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THE 



FOUNTAIN; 



JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 



Illustrated with One Hundred and Forty-Two Engravings. 



BY 

ANDREW JACKSON DAVIS. 



<{ There's a fount about to stream, 
There's a light about to gleam.'' 



FIRST EDITION 




BOSTON : 
WILLIAM WHITE & COMPANY, 

BANNER OF LIGHT OFFICE, 158 WASHINGTON STREET. 

NEW YORK: 
AMERICAN NEWS CO., AGENTS, 119 NASSAU STREET. 

1870. 






Entered according to an Act of Congress, in the year 1870, 

By ANDREW JACKSON DAVIS, 

In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. 



McCREA & MILLER, 
209-213 East 12th Street. 



INTRODUCTION. 



One bright morning last May, as I was idly sleeping at the foot of a 
grand mountain, the voice of a revered instructor said : " Arise ! Go up 
to the very top ; survey the ways of wisdom ; observe the needs of the 
world ; be healthful and hopeful, and perform thy work." 

After journeying through a mass of chilly clouds, which clung to the 
steep sides of the mountain, I gained the glorious summit. With serene 
joy and grateful admiration, I gazed upon the magnificence of the heav- 
ens, and upon the loveliness of the earth, which were unfolded and dis- 
played in every direction. And observing no human being near me, and 
feeling myself alone in the lofty solitudes of the mountain, I turned 
toward mankind, and said : " world ! here am I, after a slow and toil- 
some progress, far away from you, yet ready to work for you. What will 
you accept from me ? " 

And suddenly there appeared in the beautiful landscape, not far from 
the foot of the mountain, A FOUNTAIN ! It was exceedingly beautiful 
in its strength and simplicity. The sparkling water was flowing and jet- 
ting incessantly. And the waters of that Fountain seemed to be com- 
pounded of the needs and wants and wishes of multitudes, yea, hundreds 
of thousands, of warm, living human hearts ! 

And in the beautiful light above the fount, a friendly voice said : 
" Write a book, with thoughts for men and pictures for children, which 
the young as well as the matured can peruse with pleasure and profit." 
After a silence, the voice added : " Truth, Love, Peace, Mercy, Wisdom, 
Labor, Education, Religion, Admonition, Hope — these streams, with occa- 
sional jets and clear intimations of new meanings, must flow from the 
Fountain. To this end employ little things. With pure affections and 



iv INTRODUCTION. 

familiar illustrations you must appeal to the understanding and the heart. 
To improve the human mind, and to aid and enliven the world's mothers 
and fathers and educators, you must amuse while you instruct." 

Accordingly, in obedience to the voice of wisdom, I proceeded to 
" write," and the present volume is the result. 

Employing every aid at my command, I have attempted, with the ut- 
most sincerity of motive, to relieve the grave profundities and the dazzling 
magnitude of the Harmonial Ideas, by the introduction of pleasing sim- 
plicities which may attract and instruct persons of every age and in all 
states of feeling. And all deficiencies, as well as the omission of many 
deeply important subjects, must be attributed to the fact that this volume 
is designed to be simply the first of a short series of like import. In 
this book there is no effort to sound the very deep in the treatment of any 
question. The wish to attract and enlighten young persons — in short, to 
reach the entire family group — is paramount to the desire to impart ori- 
ginal ideas to established thinkers. 

u I have often thought," remarks a scholarly writer, " if the minds of 
men were laid open, we should see but little difference between that of a 
wise man, and that of a fool. There are infinite reveries, numberless 
extravagances, and a succession of vanities, which pass through each." 
Of grown-up men and women, and of little children and our young folks, 
the same reflection seems to be not less applicable. Whatever is truly 
attractive, pleasing, and instructive to one is likely to be equally enter- 
taining and profitable to the other. It has thus far been observed that, 
among the hundreds of thousands of elderly persons who drink deeply 
and constantly at the Harmonial Fountains, not more than a few score of 
young people read and enjoy our publications and principles. 

If the Sowings of this Fountain shall have the effect to attract and in- 
struct young persons, while slacking the honest thirst of the grave and 
thoughtful, and if the teachings of this initial volume shall in some 
degree assist parents and tutors in the rearing and just education of chil- 
dren, the Author will deem his industry amply rewarded. And he will 
interpret the general acceptance of this work to mean that additional 
books in this series are called for, 

A. J. DAVIS. 

New York, September 20, 1870. 



CONTENTS. 



CHAP PAGE. 

I. The Everlasting 7 

II. Bkauty and Destiny of Mother Nature's Darlings 20 

III. The Solitudes of Animal Life 42 

IV. Indication of Reason in Animals 54 

Y. Formation of Nationoids in America 64 

YI. The Wisdom of Getting Knowledge 82 

YII. The Children's Progressive Lyceum 110 

VIII. Lyceum Teachings for Children 123 

IX. Imagination as an Educational Force 137 

X. Prophetic Dreams and Visions during Sleep 154 

XI. True and False Worship. 162 

XII. Origin and Influence of Prayer 180 

XIII. Realms of Sorrow and Superstition 200 

XIV. Effect of a Mistake in Religion 221 

XV. Omens and Signs among Religionists 233 




I. 



The Everlasting O. 



rjlIIE English alphabet contains no letter more re- 
X markable than the familiar fourth vowel, O ; 
with which, therefore, I have elected to begin this 
book of interior entertainments. 

The fifteenth letter is written and spoken more 
frequently than any other in the language, with the 



8 



JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 



exception of the superlatively important initial, A. 
This is because no other letter so spontaneously ex- 
presses the many and various feelings of the impress- 
ible spirit. It involuntarily bubbles up to the tongue, 
in the shape of an interjection, as the natural sound 
of almost every imaginable emotion—of surprise, joy, 
alarm, aversion, sorrow, supplication. 

Bees do not swarm more thickly into a clover-field 
than does this letter crowd itself into the flowers of 

literature. The very 
existence of poetry de- 
pends upon the exist- 
ence of this simple 
vowel. Starting with 
these hints, where can 
you not go in tracing 
the inclisp disability of 
this item of the alphabet ? The en^ 
tire structure of literature would 
crumble should one letter be with- 
drawn. Thus we learn, that least 
things are necessary to the greatest. 
Let us remember, 
right here, that the first and the last letters in the Greek 
alphabet are A and O. Hence, in the Bible phrase- 
ology, the representative terms, " Alpha and Omega," 
are naturally used to signify the beginning and the end. 




THE EVERLASTING 0. 9 

A is the first figure employed to symbolize the first 
vocal sound made irresistibly by merely opening the 
mouth, with the feeling or wish of utterance in the 
heart. A, M, and O come out of the sweet lips of 
infants as naturally as music flows from the mouths 
of birds. 

Destroy the letter O, and you annihilate the Greek 
language. And then, what would become of poetry 
and prayers ? " O heart of fire ! " tell us what would 
be thy fate ? Men of language ! tell us who, deprived 
of the use of this letter, could exclaim " O, Lord ! " " O, 
Mother Church ! " " O, God, Omnipotent ! " Without 
the sound of O, there could be no natural expression 
in any language of the emotions of joy, warning, 
admiration, entreaty, or compassion. In vain might 
we hunt for a substitute 

11 Over low-lands forest-grown, 
Over waters island -strown, 
Over silver-sanded beach ; " 

yet, forever, a better letter would be beyond our 
reach ; therefore, O vowel, wisely chosen ! we lovingly 
cling to thee through the flower-fields of literature, 
through the quiet aisles of prayer ; j T ea, through the 
never-ebbing sea of immortal love we will clino; to 
thee ! Without this letter, the following could not exist 
in any language : 



10 JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 

" For the sound of waters gushing 

In bubbling beads of light ; 
For the fleets of snow-white lilies — 

Firm anchors out of sight ; 
For the reeds among the eddies — 

The crystal on the clod ; 
For the flowing of the rivers, 

We thank thee, oh, our God ! 

" For the lifting up of mountains 

In brightness and in dread ; 
For the peaks where snow and sunshine 

Alone have dared to tread ; 
For the dark of silent gorges 

Whence giant cedars nod, 
For the majesty of mountains, 

We thank thee, oh, our God ! 

u For an eye of inward seeing — 

A soul to know and love ; 
For these common aspirations 

Which our high heirship prove ; 
For the tokens of thy presence 

Within, above, abroad ; 
For thine own great gift of being, 

We thank thee, oh, our God ! " 

What a history of completeness and perfection is 
the history of this simple figure, O. About three 
hundred and fifty years before the era of Christianity, 
Plato began the investigation of the circle. After two 
centuries of researches by different spiritual philos- 



THE EVERLASTING 0. H 

opliers into the elements of the circle — the ellipse 
being one of the conic sections — the figure remained 
without further analysis for over sixteen hundred 
years. O how long ! At length, however, the 
remarkable properties of our letter were brought to 
light through minute mathematical investigation. 

Although this book is not designed to deal in 
philosophical abstractions, it cannot be deemed in- 
appropriate to quote a passage from the wise and 
comprehensive writer, J. W. Jackson, of Glasgow, 
who, being a faithful spiritual philosopher, perceives 
and affirms the spiritual origin of forms and figures. 
In the London magazine entitled Human Nature, 
for June, 1870, he thus comprehensively describes 
angles, circles, and the ellipse : " The primordial 
bodies on the cosmic plane — suns, planets, and their 
satellites — are spherical, because the sphere or uni- 
versal circle represents the perfection of a unitary 
totality, whereof they are the primal reflection and 
reproduction. The circle in process of formation 
represents creation in evolution. When closed, by the 
movement of the radius vector over the entire cyclical 
circuit, it equally represents creation finished, and so 
ready for reabsorption into the Divine unity. We 
thus see that the centre symbolizes Deity and the cir- 
cumference creation, the radius vector being a pro- 
jection of the Divine, from the eternal sphere of the 



12 JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 

Infinite One to the temporal plane of the finite many, 
or as the mystics would say, God in manifestation as 
the Demiurgus, or Logos Creator. 

" As the sphere or universal circle represents com- 
pleteness and perfection, so the cube or universal 
square represents equipoise and strength, and thus 
morally symbolizes justice and power. It is in every 
direction equilateral, and thus all its angles are right 
angles. It is the symbol of being as based on truth 
and rectitude. As the sphere, or universal circle, is 
representative of the unity, so the cube, or universal 
square, is symbolical of the trinity of form — that is, 
of height, length, and breadth, equal in dimension, 
yet diverse in direction ; that is again, as the mystics 
would say, co-ordinate in rank, equal in power, yet 
different in function. The sphere represents those 
divine integers, eternity and infinity, having neither 
beginning nor end ; while the cube or universal 
square, on the contrary, symbolizes time and space, 
each susceptible of the most rigid limitation — the 
sequences of the former implying definite periods of 
duration ; and the expanses of the latter limited areas 
of extension, like the lines and sides of a cube. Per- 
haps the reader begins now to understand something 
of the Pythagorean reverence for numbers, and the 
belief once prevalent, as to the magical power of mathe- 
matical diagrams. 



THE EVERLASTING 0. 13 

" The circle — and with it, of course, the sphere — 
is masculine because it is unitary, being formed on 
one centre, and generated by the movement of one 
radius vector. An ellipse, on the contrary, is feminine, 
being formed on two foci, whose distance is the test 
of its feminity, the intervening area being the sphere 
of multiplicity. So a square, or cube, is masculine, 
while a parallelogram, or parallelopiped, is feminine, the 
continent lines of length transcending those of breadth 
or height, so that it is no longer the symbol of absolute 
rectitude, strength, or stability. It may, perhaps, also 
be observed, that both in the ellipse and the parallelo- 
gram the containing lines are longer in proportion to 
the area enclosed than in the circle and the square." 

A perfect O — which is feminine — is a perfect 
ellipse. It is the most harmonious mathematical 
figure, containing all the lines and curves and elements 
of beauty ; and it is the form of the orbits traversed 
by the planets of space. Without the O, the uni- 
versally useful " multiplication table " would be an 
impossibility. Because, without this plain, frank let- 
ter to stand with its great meaning upon the right 
hand of other figures, we could never make any 
progress beyond the figure 9. 

Therefore was I not doing right to begin this little 
volume with the essential symbol of a yet more 
essential part of being? It is a key in every hand. 



14 



JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 




SAILING OUT TO FIND NEW MEANINGS. 



My pen needs but the prefix O, to empower it to 

u open " before you many 
pioneer paths leading through 
great mountains " of new 
meanings." 

Now let each reader 
choose his favorite keel, with 
which to plough the sea of 
spiritual commerce and in- 
tellectual discovery. Every 
sailor will feel most at home 

on his own vessel. If you would sail out upon life's 

wide ocean — if you would search the 

winter lands of earth while on your 

great voyage to summer lands, among 

the golden stars and beneath clearer 

skies on high — then enlist at once as 

helmman upon the best ship now 

riding in the harbor of your own 

honest knowledge. 

" lonely Bay of Trinity, 

dreary shores, give ear ! 
Lean down unto the white-lipped sea 
The voice of God to hear." 




BAILOR'S OCEAN HOME. 



But let all remember humility ; without O, you 
cannot sail your ship far out ; indeed, without it you 



THE EVERLASTING 0. 15 

cannot even weigh anchor. Who ever tried to write 
anchor without the use of the fifteenth letter ? 




AN HONEST MIND IS AN ANCHOR TO THE SOUL. 

Very sweet and liquid is the sturdy-looking half- 
vowel, M ! It is, I freely confess, quite as necessary 
to Latin as O is to Greek. But being one of the easiest 
to articulate, M is likely to be the first upon the rosy 
lips of childhood. It comes, O so sweetly ! in the first 
utterance of "ma." And yet, somehow, I cannot 
yield the assertion thjat our chosen feminine ellipse 
is the sovereign letter. Tou cannot perfectly articu- 
late M, except while closing your mouth and com- 
pressing the lips. Now, to try an experiment, step 
before your mirror and pronounce the beautiful letter 
under consideration. O what a fair countenance you 
present ! What an " open " mouth you immediately 
possess ! Therefore, sustained by such prime-facial 
evidence, I dare affirm that M is by nature contractive 



16 JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 

and conservative ; while our beautiful O is expansive, 
and maketh the mouth ready to speak from " the 
abundance of the heart." 

An Oasis, without the letter O, is impossible. 
The Libyan deserts of human life — without ever-green 
spots, and without fountains of musical waters — would 
destroy mankind. " Orpheus," without our opening 
letter, with all his miracles of music, would drop out 
of the world. As suddenly would vanish from the 
world's romantic literature the name " Ossian," the son 
of Fingal ; and thus, too, would forever disappear 
" Orion," and the great universe of constellations 
would know him no more. 

And, let me ask, what would become of the Otto- 
man Empire ? It would require a greater than the 
renowned Oberlin to portray the scenes accompanying 
the downfall of the house of Orleans. The lovely 
images and picturesque expressions of Ovid, with all 
his pathos, would vanish in an. instant, as would also 
the great agitator, O'Connell, and the innumerable 
" O's " which mean so much as a prefix to names of 
persons in the old, unhappy land. And unspeakably 
learned Oxford would sink into the place appointed 
unto all unprogressive institutions. 

Did you ever reflect that, without the fourth vowel, 
the revered name of u God " could not be written ; 
that, if .deprived of this talismanic letter, we could 



THE EVERLASTING 0. 



17 



not print the sacred words " mother," " love," 
" home ; " that, without it, as if crushed by a thunder- 
bolt, all life would suddenly be deprived of its 
" glory ; " and that, without it. the idea of an eternal 
" morning " could never succeed to the night and 
gloom of existence ? 

A great, strong anchor, both sure and steadfast, we 
therefore find in the perfect ellipse — our initial letter 
O ! Even the name of 



goodness is impossible with- 
out it ; yet, happily, the 
state of goodness is inde- 
pendent of all speech. 

Politicians profoundly 
realize the value of this 
vowel while laboring for 
Office, and especially when 
called upon to " take the 
Oath." Lawyers depend 
upon the fifteenth letter 
when orally opening cases 
— the outlines of which, to- 
gether with the order of the 
offence, with objects, ob- 
servations, obtruding ob- 
stacles, optional or othef- 

wise— thus they read and define the oblong character 
2 " 




cold! and, o so dreary. 



18 



JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 



on the obelisks of legal lore and sail out upon the 
broad ocean of ownership. 

And of Clergy- 
men — what can we 




O 



of lit- 



say * * U ye 
k tie faith ! " From 
H over the old ocean 
of ancient usages 
the office of the 
ministers of the 
s "Holy One" has 
been brought to the 
("shores of the new 
^ continent. And by 
virtue of that office, 
and especially owing 
to the endorsements 
of custom, the clergy- 
man is a wholesale 
dealer in the most 
sacred feelings, emotions, and passions of the human 
breast. His lan^ua^e in praver is therefore habituallv 
interjection al. " How long, O Lord, how long " shall 
this style of expression continue? is a question not 
yet answered. The templed mountain of Olympus 
does not more truly o'ertop the valleys than do the 
churches of to-day attempt to outrank the testimonies 



'O PRINCELY LOT! O BLISSFUL ART!" 



THE EVERLASTING 0. 19 

of Nature. "While the office of minister remains, the 
frequent and untrammelled pronunciation of " O " 
must also remain, and must be unfeignedly respected 
by all who sincerely believe in ministers. 

Imagine just here, O friendly reader ! the hundreds 
of thousands of words from which the letter O cannot 
be for one instant omitted. Recall the phrases which 
awaken no agreeable emotions. Are they not north- 
erly and extremely cold words ? Do they not come 
breathing fortli the chilly electricities of the frozen 
Hebrides ? Northerly and excpisiteiy bitter words, 
freighted with storm, and snow and frost — with which 
thoughts and feelings of loneliness and desolation are 
tearfully intermingled. For even so sounds, in the 
chambers of my inner hearing, all phrases not flowing 
from the fountain of wisdom and love. 

Language, like the wave of a magician's wand, can 
suddenly transform every thing about us. Because 
spirit is the fountain of feeling and wishes, and is, there- 
fore, the cause of words spoken by the obedient tongue. 

Let us, therefore, avoid, as far as possible, the 
articulation of words which casts " sweet home " into 
the dim and distant background of life's picture. Let 
us never employ any language which would hang our 
master-letter upon the scraggy limbs of some fruitless 
tree — upon some leafless tree of materialistic knowledge. 




II. 

Beauty and Destiny of Mother Nature's Dak- 
lings. 



EATHER GOD calls to His children. He calls 
them not through the hending domes and crum- 



MOTHER NATURE'S DARLINGS. 21 

bling arches of stone churches built with mortal hands. 
But His fatherly voice comes through the suns and stars 
of the boundless firmament ; through the stately monu- 
ments and constellations of the . universe ; through the 
swerveless laws of the stupendous whole ; through 
the love-breathings of the interior heart ; through the 
starry corridors of the eternal temple of Truth ; 
through the winds and waves of innumerable oceans ; 
through the cathedral solitudes and ineffable perfec- 
tions of Nature. 

Godless, indeed, is that religion which would 
silence (or rate as beneath paper books) the voices 
of such living bibles and perpetual preachers as fruit- 
trees, wild flowers, beautiful birds, whispering bees, 
sobbing seas, sighing winds, snow-covered mountains, 
and the grand old pines and mighty oaks bending with 
the weight and majesty of centuries. 

" Were I in churchless solitudes remaining ; 
Free from all voice of churchmen or divines, 
My soul would find in flowers of God's ordaining, 

Priests, sermons, shrines." 

Rightly seen, every thing in nature is a wise and 
special expression of divine affection. Indians and 
children and poets, when in their best moods, see the 
Father-Spirit in every place and in all manifestations. 
Merrily sings the divine love in birds and bees and 



22 



JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 



blossoms. And sadly sings the Infinite Spirit through 
the dark-green branches of mountain pines, and in the 
unutterable sounds of the ebbing and flowing sea. 
Infallibly speaks the Eternal in the boundlessness 
and unchangeability of those invisible principles by 
which all things live and move and have their 
being. 




LOVE AND LABOB. AMONG FLOTTEBS OF GCD'S OliDAINING. 



Nature is God's conjugal mate ; she is, therefore, 
the Mother of All. Children, like young birds, feel 
in their hearts the life of heavenly liberty. Girls not 
less than boys long for the delights of the wide, open 
fields and far-spreading trees. Boys, naturally, more 
than girls, seek bold and boisterous sports. Girls are 
taught to seek and personate the graceful, to dwell 
modestly in the quiet retirements, and to cultivate the 



MOTHER NATURE'S DARLINGS. 



23 



noiseless, the impractical, and the beautiful. This 
teaching is founded in the belief that girls are by 
nature finer than boys. While the truth is, they are 
only exact counterparts, reversed ; each qualitatively 
and in substance like the other ; but from exactly 
opposite sides of the universe. They are born of the 
same mother, nourished at the same fountain, clothed 
by the same hand, reared in the same home, watched 
over by the same guardian angels, pass through the 
process of death upon the same safe principles, and 
journey to brighter and fairer lands upon the same 
celestial highway. 

But a false system of religion, which is as arbitrary 
as the old fable which discriminates and establishes an 
antagonism between sheep and goats, has come be- 
tween children and their intuitions of truth. 

The beautiful butterfly, 
which used to represent the 
idea of individual life after 
death, attracts the girl by its 
beauty and the boy as an ob- 
ject of pursuit. Girls and 
boys are drawn into the fields 
by the same healthy, sensu- 
ous attractions. While sisters 




BOYS ARE INFLUENCED BY THE 
BEAUTIFUL. 



gather blooming buttercups, 

their brothers chase the fleeting butterflies ; bnt after 



24 



JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 



awhile they grow weary, and together they soundly 
sleep among the flowers. They awaken in obedience 
to the voice of hunger, and run like deer to the call 
of mother. Beauty in the fields, or imprisoned beauty 
(behold, how free-born birds are shut up like prisoners 




THE REFINEMENT OP CRUELTY. 



in cages!) exert the same powerful effect on children. 

The common charge, that boys are more cruel than 
girls in the wish to deprive innocent and feeble birds 
of their liberty, is groundless. The natural love of 
ownership and mastery — of possessing exclusively and 
controlling the existence of that which we love — is as 
strong and formidable in one sex as in the other. 
Spiritual culture eventually exalts this innate love ; 
substituting beauty for tyranny, and wise love for 
ignorant and selfish discipline. 



MOTHER NATURE'S DARLINGS. 



25 



Men and women associate freely together as bro- 
thers and sisters, and also in the most holy and del- 
icate relations of conjugal love ; therefore, why may 
not our boys and girls be permitted to grow up to- 
gether in the school, and in all the departments of the 
state, as well as in the home and family circle ? 




BOYS AND GIRLS IN THE WORLD TOGETHER. 



A child is a divine promise of something better. 
We are all of us only dim, crude prophecies. 

Girldom, with its sweet femininities, is promising 
only when the world of u horrid boys " is taken into the 
account with just valuations. In the family they live, 
and love, and fight, and laugh, and kick, and run, and 
eat, and play, and sing, and cry, and grow up together. 
Why not in the affairs of that larger family, called the 



26 



JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 



government, when they attain to the estate of men and 
women ? Why not ? Because a false religion, feeding 
and flattering a false custom, insists peremptorily, 
with terrible penalties of excommunication from "good 
society," that girls shall forever dress unlike boys, 
shall studiously refrain from running and climbing, 
shall make no visible demonstrations of bodily vigor, 
and shall do nothing and be nothing inconsistent 
with the established masculine rules of feminine pro- 
priety. 

The dress of a girl is constructed so that it is cer- 
tain to trammel her limbs, pervert her growth, derange 
the functions of the bodily organs, and in truth en- 
danger the safety of her physical existence. Her 
younger brother can freely and fearlessly climb hill- 
sides, race through the wildwoods, leap fences, and 
play like other darlings on the bosom of Nature. But 

only dare to let her go out 
with her brother, and lo ! 
owing to her dress, she falls 
headlong over the straight 
gate of pharisaical propri- 
ety, and is " providentially 
saved," if her beautiful life 
is not forever crushed against 
the rocks of a blind and 




LET HER FOLLOW THE FASHIONS. 



bigoted custom. 



MOTHER NATURE'S DARLINGS. 27 

Nature, who is our graceful arid ever-loving 
mother, infallibly teaches her children the right way 
and the whole Truth. She teaches her girls that it is 
their highest duty to become whatever they can be- 
come, and to do whatever they can do ; the criterion 
of right being, that the result of such being and doing 
is genuine happiness to themselves and lasting benefit 
to mankind. 



n 


<£kr^Sl«5l 




i 


i vl Wf 


L^^D^^^^^^S 


i ■■.:■' 




^^^^^^^^:^^ 



MOTHER NATURE'S DARLINGS SOMETIMES NEED WASHING AND COMBING. 

Different ambitions and different aspirations burn 
within different temperaments. Sex does not infallibly 
determine the nature and quality of this ambition, or 
aspiration ; neither is it possible for mere sex to in- 
dicate and limit and establish the sphere of its most 
effective manifestation. 

The masculine positive temperaments, which are 




28 JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 

the mediums through which the man-organization 

makes itself manifest, 
are aggressive in their 
very nature. And yet 
it should he borne in 
mind that some women 

A PLAN FOR COMPELLING THE EARTH TO are Jjq this rCSpeCt eOUal, 

ACCEPT SEED. -T U 7 

if not superior, to some 
men ; but habits and education, as much as tempera- 
ment and sex, have great sway in determining the 
manifestations of any personality. Habits exert a 
subtle influence. Women, especially among the an- 
cient Romans, by systematically educating their mus- 
cles, and by abstaining from all intoxicating drinks, 
developed noble mothers and a hardy race of sons. 
The Romans were famous for their health, strength, 
and endurance. It is safe to say that Roman and 
Spartan mothers were physically stronger and more 
enduring than many of the men and fathers in our 
more refined era. 

Still, there is a constitutional difference between a 
woman-nature and a man-nature which lies deeper 
than any habits or circumstances — a difference which, 
although absolute and essential, is not necessarily an- 
tagonistic. This sex-difference was illustrated by Mr. 
R. Grant White, in an account he somewhere pub- 
lished, in substance, as follows : " Some years ago, 



MOTHER NATURE'S DARLINGS. 29 

before monitors or even iron-clad ships were thought 
of, the enormous and now utterly useless man-of-war 
Pennsylvania lav at the "Washington navy-yard. 
Much had been expected of her. and her colossal size. 
and her enormous battery of one hundred and twenty 
guns, were looked upon with pride by all ' true 
Americans/ It was determined that the President of 
the United States, accompanied by the members of 
his Cabinet, the principal officers of the army and 
navy, and other persons of like distinction, should visit 
her for an ' inaugural ' entertainment, and that in 
honor of the occasion, he and they should be saluted 
by the discharge of all her guns. The gentlemen were 
accompanied by a large number of ladies, and a more 
numerous and representative party was probably never 
gathered together on the decks of a national vessel. 
The salute began, and the rapid discharge of the 
heavy ordnance produced a remarkable effect on the 
civilian visitors. Very soon the men were stunned or 
worried, and showed strong symptoms of nervous 
anxiety. The women, on the contrary, to the sur- 
prise of all, showed no fear, but rather delight, and 
were cheerfully excited, not concealing an inclination 
to laugh at and crow over the nervous weakness of 
their masculine companions. The firing went on, and 
became a protracted and apparently endless series of 
regular explosions. For the discharge of one hundred 



30 .JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 

and twenty guns at intervals of only three seconds 
occupies six minutes, measured by three-second counts, 
even in silence, seem as if they would never end. But 
when, as in this case, each interval is marked by a 
roar that stuns the ears and a concussion that shakes 
the heavens and the earth, and tills the air with flame 
and smoke, the performance becomes oppressive and 
tries nervous endurance to the utmost. And on this 
occasion a striking natural phenomenon, full of moral 
significance, was presented to the curious student of 
human nature. It was observed that as gun followed 
gun, the men, who were so disturbed at first, became 
quiet, self-possessed, indifferent, and at last cheerful, 
while the women, who at first were so filled with life 
and gayety, soon showed signs of weariness, then of 
nervous excitement, and finally of terror, looking for- 
ward with dread to the inevitable and regularly-recur- 
ring shock ; so that before the salute was over most 
of them were in a state of extreme distress, some were 
hysterical and some had fainted. Their nerves could 
bound with elasticity at a single fillip, but succumbed 
under repeated blows ; while the masculine nature 
toughened under resistance to the protracted strain." 

The difference between the man-temperaments and 
the woman-temperaments, is forcibly illustrated in the 
foregoing; incident. 

The man-temperament (which is sometimes also 



MOTHER NATURE'S DARLINGS. 



31 



powerfully manifested in woman), is the temperament 
for pioneering, forth-pushing, domineering, engineer- 




A MASCULINE IXTEXTIOX FOE OVERCOMING THE TTOELD. 

ing, centrifngating. Man's implements and inventions 
are designed for assailing, overcoming, crushing, 
destroying, and reforming. Man's hand grasps instru- 
ments for subduing the earth. Look at the breaking- 




up plow. Look at the seed-drill and the following har- 
row ; the compression and soothings of the roller; at 
The ponderous hammer and the anvil ; at the mighty 
forces harnessed together in the machine-shop ; at the 
pulverizing energies of the mill ; at the great cities ; 
at the dwelling-houses and immense factories; at the 



32 



JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 




A MILL FOR CRUSHING AND PULVERIZING. 



strong wagons for carrying 
lumber, stone, and iron ; 
at the steamboats for riding 
rivers, lakes, and oceans ; 
at the railroads and loco- 
motives made to accom- 
plish Jupiter-like labor ; at 
the wire paths for light- 
ning under oceans and 
around the great globe ! 
And think, too, of the discovery and settlement of new 
countries. 

These tools, these ambitions, 
these achievements, these broad 
and mighty enterprises, are crowd- 
ed by mother Nature into the rest- 
less hearts and into the incessantly 
pleading hands of her children — 
into the open hands and prayerful 
hearts of women and men alike — 
and then only time and circumstances, and the spirit's 
faithfulness to its own interior convictions, can deter- 
mine which sex, and what particular individuals among 
men and women, are most attracted and adapted to 
the grand ends and uses in contemplation. 

Man's force-and-drive elements combine naturally 
and fruitfully with woman's elements of power-and- 




MEANS AND ENDS. 



MOTHER NATURE'S DARLINGS. 



33 



aspiration. Her power, which is noiseless and spirit- 
ual, while it requires less brain for its manifestation, 




MAKING INSTRUMENTS FOR ASSAULT AND CONQUEST. 

vet demands a far more compact and impressible 
physical organism. Man's force, which is full of noise 
and derived from the soul (which in this life is the 
spirit's fulcrum or harness), requires a larger brain, 
more physical body, and a harder-knit frame. But, 
taken together, and viewed and compared as to their 
relative endowments and real modes of expression, it 
will be found impossible to establish the least radical 
or fundamental inferiority or superiority between men 
and women. They are both mother Nature's darlings ; 
and my counsel to them is : Obey Nature. 

Nature, in the largest sense, is adequate to every 
emergency. She tells woman what to do, and how to 



34 



JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 



do it, as she also tells and instructs man. But saint 
Custom, whose mandates are proclaimed by masculine 
priests upon the house-tops, and especially for the 
benefit of the multitudes of worshipping listeners, 
says : " Wives and daughters ! thou shalt not par- 
ticipate in neither of the brave-and-dare vocations 
proper alone to man. Behold ! the gulf between the 
sphere and labors of woman and the sphere and labors 
of man, is impassable. You must be self-indulgent 
and proned to luxury, and devoted to the cultivation 




CULTIVATING A TASTB FOB DISPLAY. 



of those delicate arts and winuing ways by which rude 
man, self-denying and inured to hardship, is easily led 
and beneficially governed." 

The fiat has gone forth ! Henceforth your wives and 
daughters must unquestioningly obey. Behold tho 



MOTHER NATURE'S DARLINGS. 35 

fruits thereof! They are forthwith beautifully helpless 
and full of demand. They will do nothing practically 
to enrich themselves. They long for the thousand and 
one pretty ornaments and magnificent dresses of the 
reigning fashion ; for the feathers and laces and ribbons 
and curls ; and for the artificial flowers and grasshop- 
pers for head ornaments, — all these crowd into the 
feminine imagination with aggravating profusion. 
Meanwhile men's imaginations are exasperatingly 
wrought up to the problem of supporting all this 
uncontrollable folly ; to which few of them dare 
openly oppose their will ; for they, too, are largely 
involved in the popular magnetism of a despotic, im- 
placable, and diabolizing fashion. Thus the boys and 
men give their time to machinery and to the mulplica- 
tion of world-subduing inventions ; while the girls and 
women are passing their time in constructing the home- 
beauties, and in multiplying the manifold fleeting 
attractions of personal exist- 
ence. 4&P^ 

By this false state is estab- 
lished that modern absurdity, 
known as a fashionable parlor, 
which leads one to ask : " How 
many people do we call on 
from year to year, and know 
no more of their feelings, habits, tastes, family 




GIRLS MUST GROW LIKE THE 
DAISIES. 



36 JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 

ideas and waj T s, than if they lived in Kamtschatka? 
And why ? Because the room which they call a 
front parlor is made expressly so that you shall 
not know. They sit in a back room — work, talk, 
read perhaps. After the servant has let you in and 
opened a crack in the shutters, and while you sit 
waiting for them to change their dress and come in, 
you speculate as to what they may be doing. From 
some distant region the laugh of a child, the song of a 
canary bird, reaches you, and then a door claps hastily 
to. Do they love plants ? Do they write letters, sew, 
embroider, crochet ? Do they ever romp and frolic ? 
What books do they read % Do they sketch or paint ? 
Of all these possibilities a mute and muffled room says 
nothing. ... A sofa, six chairs, two ottomans, fresh 
from the upholsterer's, a Brussels carpet, a centre 
table, with four gilt books of beauty on it, a mantel 
clock from Paris, two bronze vases — all these tell you 
only in frigid tones : ' This is the best room,' — only 
that and nothing more : and soon she trips in in her 
best clothes, and apologizes for keeping you waiting, 
asks you how your mother is, and you remark that it 
is a pleasant day, and thus the acquaintance progresses 
from year to year." 

The mind and its affections grow to resemble in 
shape and feeling that upon which they constantly feed ; 
and from the structure and affections of the mind 



MOTHER NATURE'S DARLINGS. 



37 



we derive and establish u character." Men, for exam- 
ple, think and work upon the world's dry hard facts ; 
and thus men's characters and dispositions become dry 
and severe. Women of fashion, on the contrary, with 
a devotion and perseverance worthy of a better cause, 
are meanwhile reading the sweet nothings of literature, 
or listlessly sleeping the pleasant hoars away among 
flowers, and their characters exactly correspond to 
their mode of life. 




GIRLS AND BOYS SOSIETLSIES WORK TOGETHER. 



It is recorded that one of the curiosities that is con- 
tinually presenting itself to the census-taker is the 
large number of young women who are found listlessly 
dawdling about houses, poring over the la^t new 
novel, or thrumming Offenbachian melodies on patient 
pianos, and this too often in poor families, where the 



38 



JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 



mother is busy with the manifold cases of household 
duties, which could be materially lightened by the 
assistance of her daughters. 

Testimony by a woman, which fully justifies the 
strength of the charge herein made, is undisguisedly 
thus : " In the nursery the mother is called upon to 
set forward the same injustice which presided over 
her own education. * Preaching down a daughter's 
heart,' the beautiful phrase of Tennyson, becomes the 
duty of every woman who finds in her daughter 
saliency of intellect and individuality of will. Medi- 
ocrity is the standard ! ' Seek not, my child, to go 




EMBLEMS OE FASHIONABLE EMOTIONS. 



bej^ond it. Thou hast thy little allotments. The 
French must be thy classics, the house accounts thy 



MOTHER NATURE'S DARLINGS. 39 

mathematics. Patchwork, cooking, and sweeping thy 
mechanics ; dress and embroidery thy fine arts. See 
how small the sphere. Do not venture outside of it, 
nor teach thy daughters, when thou shalt have such, 
to do so. 5 And so we women, from generation to 
generation, are drilled to be the apes of an artificial 
standard, made for us and imposed upon us by an out- 
sider ; a being who, in this attitude, becomes our 
natural enemy." 

Thus the difference in the conduct of life between 
men and women in popular society, is founded in the 
difference established through their unjust education 
and dissimilar habits. Inasmuch as men and women 
are derived from the same fountain of divine life, are 
compounded of identical elements, and have a common 
destiny in the grand progressive career of eternity ; 
therefore they should learn at once, and practically, 
to make less educational difference on account of sex 
in their tastes, professions, interests, duties, labors, and 
emoluments. 

There is an unfathomable fit of injustice in that 
social structure which makes labors, rewards, pleas- 
ures, vices, crimes, and the enactment and enforcement 
of laws, turn upon the shallow question of sex. Any 
theory of life, religion, or government, which un- 
balances the divine equilibrium of Justice, in effect 
evolves and confirms a wicked warfare between men 



40 



JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 



and women, and should be consigned with the popular 
theology to the pit of oblivion. It establishes a 




EVERT WIFE, AND ESPECIALLY EVERY MOTHER, IS ENTITLED TO A M HOME " 
(FREE OF ALL DEBTS AND DEMANDS). 



wicked antagonism between the two sides of the 
human universe. 

The inculcations of this chapter are easily summed 
up : Let your boys and girls run out into the beautiful 
world, and let them grow as they play together ; for 
very soon, as men and women, they will together lay 
the foundations of future families, societies, states, and 
nations. 

Babyhood first, then childhood, next youth, and 
then, O how quickly, in this whirling world ! — come 
womanhood and manhood ; lastly, old age, and then — ■ 



MOTHER NATURE'S DARLINGS. 41 

by the revolution of time's wheel — a certificate from 
earth's school-masters, entitling the bearer to a full 
College-course in some of the many mansions " not 
made with hands/' 

Forever let Love's scepter remain in the soft, 
honest, kiugly right hand of Wisdom. Infinitely fairer 
and higher will grow the world — less thorny and bit- 
ter, less cold and desolate, less miserable and unjust, 
will seem our pathway — if men, instead of perpetuat- 
ing the errors and cherishing the superstitions of a 
former age, would obey the voice of God, speaking 
infallibly through the mouth of our universal loving 
mother Xature. 




III. 



The Solitude of Animal Life. 



IT must be remembered that plants, in all their vast 
varieties, are only parts of animals ; that animals 
are only parts of human organizations ; and that the 
all-embracing perfection of the human structure com- 
pletes and coronates the eternal mountains of life. 

Like all incomplete forms of life and animation, 
however, these manifold fragments of the one growing 
organism, are happily unconscious of their own incom- 
pleteness. In themselves, and when not contrasted 
with man's microcosmic structure and transcendent 
mental endowments, all the plants and animals are 



SOLITUDE OF ANIMAL LIFE. 43 

perfect, and, of course, possess no per se consciousness 
of individual imperfection. 

The surpassing beauty and sympathetic wisdom 
manifested in all these kingdoms of Nature cannot 
but unfold in man holy meditations of Deity. 

But owing to the innate imperfections — the intrin- 
sically partial instinctiveness and automatic imbecil- 
ities of the animal's heart and intellect, its life must be 
essentially solitary. The profound abysses of seas and 
oceans — the dreary wastes of swampy wildernesses — 
the lonely caves hidden in the dark bosoms of great 
mountains slumbering in the unexplored hearts of con- 
tinents — these are the homes of hundreds of thousands 
of animals ! 

What can be more overcharged with loneliness 
than the life of an ignorant man ? What solitude is 
profounder than the cheerless, obscure, deeply-shaded 
brain of an idiotic human mind ? " The foxes have 
holes " in the mountains of solitude ; and the " birds 
of the air have nests " in the sacred stillness of the 
forest ; but widely over them all, as 
upon all the kingdoms below the 
human, hangs and broods the affec- 
tionate and solitary night of imper- 
fection. 

Everywhere around man are affec- 
N0 ™ ain™ 3 IN tionately living and dependency clus- 




u 



JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 



tering millions upon millions of objects — little beings, 
below man's estate, manifesting wondrous beauty of 
structure and incomparable wisdom — existing in ser- 
vant-states of subordination, each inspired with the 
holy mission of feeding upon, refining, and lifting 
lower and gross atoms of matter, so that such atoms 
can feed and fellowship with the sovereign needs of 
the crowning human kingdom. 

Apparatus upon apparatus exists _r 

in full action — the steady- grinding 
mills of God — animated by and obe- 
dient to the infinite law of Progress. 
These living mills — the bees, bugs, 
reptiles, rats, creeping things, vines, 
plants, insects, birds, slugs, worms, 
weevil — are hard at work, both day and night, in 
order to receive and advance grossest particles for 
the nourishment and development of mankind. 




GREAT WORKERS IN 
THE WOODS. 




LITTLE MILLS FOR REFINING GROSS MATTER. 

And these refining organized mills — these infinitely 
diversified and w r ondrously beautiful little creatures — 
live in the great solitudes of the globe ; in the in- 



SOLITUDE OF ANIMAL LIFE. 45 

accessible fortresses of rocks, in the watery deeps of 
great rivers, in the hiding places of the boundless 
fields, and everywhere, in the countless dark retire- 
ments, throughout the wide extents of nature. And I 
think it is well worth remembering that there are no 
artificial contrivances, no instruments or mills invented 
by man, which can be compared, either as to the 
amount or the perfection of the labor performed, with 
the results of the incessant industry of the plants and 
animal organisms in Nature's magnificent workshops. 




BIRDS LIVE TOR THE GOOD OF THE WHOLE. 

The holy affectionateness manifested by birds should 
beneficially impress every true mind. My admiration 
is challenged, as much as my heart is impressed to 
worship, when I see the beauty and hear the early 
songs of birds. They are our great Mother's " wander- 
ing minstrels,' 1 who, like angel-pioneers, explore the 
solitudes of the world, and then bashfully shrink from 
observation within the starry temple of night. 



46 JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 

Birds are forms of affection. They are, therefore, 
extremely impressible and impulsive, and are in- 
fluenced by very fine and imperceptible circumstances. 
They sing their truest songs — that is, their vocaliza- 
tions are most spontaneous and musically freighted — 
when electrical " conditions " of the hour are balanced 
and harmonious. If the morning light and after sun 
shine are just right — if the shrubs and vines along the 
walls are truly graceful and poetical — if the cloudy 
sky does not cast a too deep shade upon orchards and 
verges of forests — then, on that day, you may expect 
some great music from robins, bobolinks, song-spar- 
rows, linnets, and meadow-larks. 

The sounds of birds express feelings and emotions ; 
not thoughts and wishes, which imply reflection. 
They embody in their songs the sensations of love-laden 
bosoms ; which are sometimes happy, sometimes fear- 
ful, sometimes angry, sometimes coquettish, sometimes 
filled with aversion, sometimes overflowing with fond- 
ness and joy ; thus resembling, rudimentally and 
germinally, the higher human heart when not gov- 
erned by reflection and wisdom. 

What must we think of that boy who could de- 
liberately shoot or stone the world's loving minstrels ? 
Behold the wonderfully beautiful nest of a brooding 
bird ! With what unutterable aversion must we 
regard a boy who could deliberately climb a tree 



SOLITUDE OF ANIMAL LIFE. 



47 




PUNISHMENT OP A NEST-ROBBER. 



in order to frighten away the motherly brooding 

bird, and then 
steal the suppli- 
cating and de- 
pendent little 
ones which con- 
tain her heart's 
warm love and 
beauty ? 

Remember, 
ye robbers and 
despoil ers of the 
weak and inno- 
cent ! — remem- 
ber that the sleepless justice, not less than the sustain- 
ing love, of the Unchangeable Spirit lives and rules in 
the life of the tiny plant and in the smallest animal of 
the globe ; and, likewise, remember that whatsoever 
" ye do to the least of these my little ones," is done hy 
you against the divine law of your immortal life / and 
the consequence is, that by the inflexible and unavoida- 
ble judgment meted out by the just laws of that 
eternal life, your punishment and your mortification, 
for every kind and shade of offence, will be absolutely 
certain — either in some day in this world, or in some 
one of your countless estates in the great infinity into 
which you are perpetually travelling. 



48 



JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 



There is, however, another side to our charitable 
estimate of the beautiful uses of bugs, slugs, grubs, 
flies, insects, worms, weevil, lice, mice, midge, &c. ; 
which is, that they exist, in connection with man's 
dealings with himself and the globe, as the legitimate 
effects of such avoidable causes and conditions as filth, 
abuse, exhaustion, devastation, and slovenly habits. 




ANIMATED MILLS AT WORK IN THE WILDWOOD. 



Hence a truly advanced and spiritualized state in 
our common humanity — manifested in cleanliness in 
mental and bodily life, and in refinements and purifica- 
tions extended throughout the gardenized fields and 
fertilized farms — will destroy these innumerable ad- 
versaries to man's comfort, respectability, and pros- 
perity. 

The millions upon millions of dollars lost, by the 
ravages of various prowling birds and hungry insects, 
are legitimate punishments for neglect, abuse, outrages, 
or inexcusable ignorance. Of course, when the little 



SOLITUDE OF ANIMAL LIFE. 49 

legitimate workers come — when caterpillars, worms, 
grasshoppers, and lice arrive in vast hosts in order to 
help on the work of the globe's refinement, which man 
should have prevented by his superior wisdom and 
industry — yes ! when the innumerable little u mills of 
God " have come — crawling upon their white bellies, 
running upon their many legs, flying upon the millions 
of hot-sounding wings, boring with their sharp horns, 
biting with their needle-teeth — yes, O man ! when 
these friends come, thou should'st be very kind to them 
in your great sorrow, and should'st learn wisdom amid 
the surrounding devastations. 

Birds, let it be remembered, are the great field- 
allies and inseparable friends of mankind. They in- 
stinctively aid man in the destruction of his countless 
enemies, which hide themselves in the cellars of trees 
and plants, and in the germ-grains of the harvest- 
fields. Therefore, he who destroys these feathered 
sentinels is inflicting vast and irreparable losses upon 
the agriculturalists and fruit-growers ; to say nothing 
of the wrong done to the thousands of poor families 
who depend upon the crops for the means of life. 

One mill of organized life feeds upon another ; so 
all the wheels turn ; and every hopper grinds out its 
allotted grist. Although it is true that worms, wee- 
vil, lice, flies, and bugs arise from the grossest condi- 
tions of material imperfection — and from human 
4 



50 JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 

ignorance, human filth, human abuses, and human 
vagabondage ; yet, intimately associated with them, 
there also come great swarms and flocks of hungry 
workers (the various insect-eating birds of the air), 
which " mean business," and which at once set about 
helping man to clean up his dirty ways, and thus to 
purify his miserable life. Yes, these same mice, lice, 
grasshoppers, &c, which come like a mighty army of 
Goths and Yandals — ruthless invaders of man's fields 
and habitations — are only so many crude immigrants, 
great laborers and indispensable " field-hands," — come 
out of imperfection to make perfection come. 

The supreme law of kindness 
and love, which is justice, should 
govern man in all his relations 
and intercourse with his subor- 
dinates and servants in the 
floods and fields of existence. the night-hawk works 

WHILE YOU SLEEP. 

When first I arrived at the 
great knowledge that all minerals and plants, all vege- 
tables and vines, all flowers and fruits, — in a word, that 
all the millions upon millions of moving and feeling 
creatures which abound in the animal world, had 
existed and were existing for the benign general pur- 
pose of unfolding and sustaining man's organization — ■• 
when I arrived at this knowledge, then my heart, all 
at once enlarged and sanctified by its new universal 




SOLITUDE OF ANIMAL LIFE. 



51 




ONE OF NATURE'S HIGH 
PRIESTS. 



sympathy with every living 
thing, grew inexpressibly tender 
and bountiful to all the breath- 
ing world. The sublime solitudes 
and sweet companionships of 
affection encompassed and un- 
folded my spirit. Not again 
could I willingly divide flesh 
from its life by instruments of 
torture. With appalling thoughts 
I recalled the acts of my 
gentlemen acquaintances — 
the effects of murderous 
rifles even in the white 
hands of adventurous young 
women — away in the soli- 
tudes of the wilderness, 
hunting the fish, the wild 
birds, and chasing and cap- 
turing the pleading, suppli- 
cating deer! How little can 
such hunters really know, and 
Low much less must they real- 
ly allow themselves to feel, 
concerning the exquisite har 
mony and sympathy mani 
fested by the Eternal Heart in 




BEAUTIFUL IN THE WOOD AND 
GLEN. 




SINGING THE SONG OF PRO- 
GRESS. 



52 



JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 



the living things of nature ! Universal culture will 
bring an era of universal tenderness. 

Nothing can be more 
shallow and garrulous than 
wild fowls and the "game 
of life " in the great re- 
treats of meadow and wil- 
derness. The babbling 
tongue of purling streams 




SOLITARY AMONG THE REEDS AND 
EDDIES. 



is not friendlier nor more childish- 
ly chatty in conversation. Gre- 
garious and familiar, in their asso- 
ciations, are the original tenants of 
fields and floods and forests; yet, 
compared with what there is in 
man's kingdom, to know and to en- 
joy, how inexpressibly lonely and 
poor are the servants in the im- 
mense cellars and dungeon-kitchens 
of the great earth ! 

The great round world — which 
has a great heart, pure and modest, 
and charged with finely-shaded secrets, and with pri- 
vacies of great richness, never yet exposed to un- 
worthy eyes — -this great world is man's schoolhouse, 
his 'home for a^tiine, and his vast machine-shop. His 
mental sagacity and manual skill are coin :i)ensur ate 




SOCIAL SOUNDS OF WILD 
CORN. 



SOLITUDE OF ANIMAL LIFE. 



53 




'_r0^£*±~-2^. - 



USEFUL, BUT NOT A CEL- 
EBRATED SINGER, 



with the good use lie makes of 
his surrounding opportunities. A 
whole world of truth lies concealed 
within the simple exterior of a 
garden-plant. Not only love and 
sympathy, not only wisdom in its 
manifold manifestations, not only 
prophetic animal life and processes 
emblematic of immortal human 
progress ; but, yet more, in the 
simple plant — in the corn, wheat, 
fruit-trees, vines, and floral 
growths of garden and field — man 
may, if his eyes are pure and 
quite clear, see the very essence 
of that Divine Spirit by which the 
universe is unfolded and sustained. 
If you accept animals as ap- 
proximate parts of yourself, both 
physically and mentally, although 

not spiritually, then you are 
prepared and enkindled enough 
to accept evidences that ani- 
mals have parts of human in- 
telligence and sagacity. With 
this idea in mind let us proceed 

NATURE PERPETUATES HER- ^ ^ fojfo^g copter. 




man's friend and bene- 
factor. 





IV. 



Indications of Reason in Animals. 

WISDOM, or rather the faculties by which Wis- 
dom is unfolded, can be made larger and wiser 
by interrogating " the foolish things of this world." 
But the cheerful confidence and profound self-conceit 
of the unwise, who know not their ignorance, is a bar 
to further investigation and improvement. Having 
intuitive graspings of a few principles, and realizing 
the frequent deficiency of book-learned persons in 
these very intuitions, the unwise are sorely tempted 
to become elated, pedantic, and self-sufficient. 

" There is," said Ruskin, u in every animal's eye a 



REASON IN ANIMALS. 



55 






dim foregleam of humanity, a flash of strange light, 
through which their life looks out and up to our great 
mystery of command over them, and claims the fel- 
lowship of the creature if not of the soul." 

Man, in his high and true estate, is the animal's 
superior both by organization and acquirement. But 
man inverted, or with his faculties yet slumbering in 
their easy cerebral beds, is frequently inferior to the 
animals about him; of which unwelcome proposition 
let me fortify you with evidence. A noble act per- 
formed by a dog is 
thus narrated : 

" My oldest son 
was crossing the fields 
in the country, some 
distance from any 
dwelling, when he was 
pursued by a large 
and fierce dog belong- 
ing to the gentleman 
whose land he was 
crossing. The lad was 
alarmed, and ran for 
his life. He struck 
into a piece of woods, 
and the dog gained 

EVERT DOG IS ENTITLED TO HIS DAT. lip Oil Him, WUCn D.G 




56 JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 

looked around to see how near the creature was, and 
tumbling over a stone, he pitched off a precipice and 
broke his leg. Unable to move, and at the mercy of 
the beast, the poor fellow saw the dog coining down 
upon him, and expected to be seized and torn ; when, 
to his surprise, the dog came near and perceiving the 
boy w r as hurt, he instantly wheeled about and went off 
for aid which he could not render himself. There was 
no one within reach of the child's voice, and he must 
have perished there, or dragged his broken limb along, 
and destroyed it so as to render amputation necessary, 
if the dog did not bring him help. He held up his 
leg, and it hung at a right angle, showing him plainly 
the nature of his misfortune, and the necessity of lying 
still. The dog went off to the nearest house and 
barked for help. Unable to arrest attention, he made 
another visit of sympathy to the boy, and then ran to 
the house, there making such demonstrations of anxiety, 
that the family followed him to the place where the 
child lay. Now observe that this dog was pursuing 
this boy, as an enemy ; but the moment he saw his 
enemy prostrate and in distress, his rage was turned 
to pity, and he flew to his relief. Here was true feel- 
ing, and the course he pursued showed good judgment. 
He was a dog of heart and head. Very few men, not 
all Christians, help their enemies when they fall. 
This dog was better than many men who claim to be 



REASON IN ANIMALS. 



57 



good men. I do not say that he reasoned in this mat- 
ter ; but there is something in his conduct on this 
occasion that looks so much like the right kind of feel- 
ing and action, that I think it deserves to be recorded 
to his credit. As few dogs will read the record, I 
commend the example to all mankind for their imita- 
tion." 




AFFECTION AMONG DOMESTIC FOWLS. 



A story of some little chickens is thus pleasantly 
told by a correspondent of the American Scotchman : 
" Not long ago we received from England a pair of 
very handsome fowls of a superior breed, of which we 
took considerable care. The spring of the year being 
very wet and cold, we were unfortunate with the first 
brood, saving only one chicken. Shortly afterward, 
however, our hen had another brood of fine chickens, 



58 JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 

to which she was remarkably attentive ; and when 
they were only a few days old, they were going into a 
clover-field near the house; it being a very stormy 
day, the gate blew down, and unluckily fell on our 
hen and her little ' chicks. 5 We hurried to release 
them, and were soon at hand ; but we found to our 
sorrow, that our favorite hen and several of the little 
chickens were killed, leaving five of them still alive 
and unhurt under her wings. Those we at once placed 
by themselves in a coop. Our little girl, then, brought 
the chicken from the first brood, and put it along as 
company for the night with the little ones. Early next 
morning, we went to see how the little family were 
getting along. We were very much surprised to find 
tie little chicken, which was placed with them, acting 
the part of mother ! There she was, with a very 
peculiar chuck, tending and feeding them ; not a bit 
would she eat until the little ones were satisfied first ! 
The affair became quite interesting, and was looked 
upon as a great curiosity. Many an hour was spent 
by our neighbors, as well as ourselves, in watching 
them ; it was so amusing to see the chicken trying to 
get the little ones under her wings ; this, however, was 
a little more than she could manage ; but they seemed 
perfectly happy with their little mother, and for nearly 
two months got along remarkably well. Unfortunate- 
ly, what has been to us such a source of pleasure 



REASON IN ANIMALS. 



59 



proved too much for the tender little frame of our 
chicken — she pined away, notwithstanding all the care 
and attention we could bestow upon her, and our little 
favorite died ; and when we buried her, it really 
seemed as if we had lost some kind friend. We could 
scarcely eat, and, I assure you, that morning there 
was not a dry eye in our house." 

Domesticated an- 
imals, especially the 
dog and the horse, 
mav be taught to 
perform " tricks n and 
to manifest intelli- 
gence. They, how- 




HOGS AND HENS ARE MILLS FOR REPINING 
EXCREMENTITIOUS ATOMS. 



edge to their progeny, 
imals, unlike mankind, are endowed 
and governed automatically by the 
laws of immutable instinct. This dif- 
ference is a gate of iron. 

But the incessant operation of pro- 
gressive laws, in the realms of matter 
and in mind, in the course of ages re- 



ever, never seem to 
intellectually prize 
what they thus ac- 
quire, nor do they 
impart such knowl- 
as man does ; because an- 







THE SOURCE OP OTTB 
WOOLEN GARMENTS. 




60 JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 

suits in the extinguishment of inferior orders and in the 
gradual yet certain establishment of perfect types of 
every kind of life and sensation. 

Some associate with hens and 
chickens in the very common, yet im- 
portant mission of eating and refining 
up the excrementitious and other very 
gross conditions of matter. When ^j%*0* 
mankind come to fully understand ^ T S ^, R ^ E ™^ 
that swine and various breeds of fowls 
are but automatic gastronomical machines for rooting 
up and eating, and thus forwarding for the similar use 
of higher organisms, a great mass of otherwise poison- 
ous and disgusting material, most people will forthwith 
cease devouring their flesh as a suitable article of food. 

But, returning to the evidence that animals are but 
fragments and prophecies of men, we quote the follow- 
ing from Watson's work on " The Reasoning Power 
in Animals," who says that horses will not only be- 
moan lost companions, but sympathize with, and 
endeavor to relieve, their living associates. 

" A gentleman was one evening in the full enjoy- 
ment of a pleasant dinner-party, in his own house. 
It so happened that a glass-door opened from the 
dining-room upon the lawn. Pushing open this door, 
a most extraordinary and unbidden visitor entered the 
room. Starting up, the amazed company beheld a 



REASON IN ANIMALS. 61 

quadruped which had never entered that room before. 
The gentleman advanced, and recognized one of his 
favorite mares, which, undaunted by the blazing light 
and the crowding round her of the astonished guests, 
showed by voice and manner some strange emotion. 
Her master went up to the animal, which trotted off, 
uttering a peculiar cry. It was determined to ascer- 
tain the cause of the mare's strange conduct. She was 
followed to a field, and the motive for her unwonted 
behavior was quickly discovered. Her foal had got 
entangled in bog and briars, and the alarmed mother 
had adopted this effective mode of obtaining aid." 

A similar incident has been told of a sheep ; in 
both cases the appeal for human help had a rational 
motive, and was prosecuted in a rational manner. 
Some of the ingenious feats of the more clever horses 
have a close resemblance to human actions. Take the 
following case, narrated in Mr. Smiles's u Life of 
Rennie, the Engineer." A horse, called Jack, was one 
among many employed at the erection of Waterloo 
bridge. The horse was accustomed to draw the stone 
trucks along a tramway to the places where the stone 
was required. A beer-shop was, of course, opened 
near the works, for the special use of the ' navvies,' 
and other workmen. The driver of Jack's truck was 
an honest sort of fellow, named Tom, who had one 
special weakness — an inability to pass the beer-ahop 



62 



JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 



without taking " a little." Jack was so accustomed to 
this that, though a restive animal, he waited content- 
edly till Tom came out of his own accord, or till the 
appearance of an overlooker startled the man into 
activity. On one occasion, however, when the super- 
intendents were absent, Tom took so long a spell at the 
ale that Jack became restive, and the trace-fastenings 
being long enough, the animal put his head inside the 
ale-house door, and seizing the astonished Tom by the 
collar with his teeth, dragged the lazy man out to the 
^f^_ _^^ truck. Every man 

_g " } * f "^ v there understood 
the action of the 
horse, and great 
became the fame 
'' i l t r -;->M- of Jack among the 
host of workers." 

In the curtained 
brain and muffled 
tongue of the an- 
imal reside the fun- 
da mentals of hu- 
man intelligence 
and speech. No 
sea - weed floating 
on the billow, no 

ANIMALS DISLIKE —^O TREAT THEM ^^ ^^ fa^ 




REASON IN ANIMALS. 63 

bing through the heart of fish or bird, but works fur 
and prophesies of man. Lovingly the song of trees, 
with tongues overflowing with an infinite language, 
tell man's listening spirit that not a bee, not a fly, not 
a gnat breathes and burns in vain. 

What would I not give in exchange for the power 
to put this whole gospel into the warm bosoms of my 
fellow-men ! Gusts of passion, hail-storms in social 
life, sword of warrior, thunders of battle, groans of 
dying men, moanings of animals in death agony — no 
more of any of this horrible injustice would be pos- 
sible ! — if I could but breathe into the throbbing 
hearts of my peers and fellow-pilgrims the everlasting 
truth concerning the animals who live before, beneath, 
around, and within us — our small-brained, almost 
imbecile, helpless, solitary, dependent, ever-faithful 
relatives, and friends in disguise — most wonderful 
forces and organizations, existing and laboring inces- 
santly for the progression of all matter, and for the 
ultimate perfection of the whole earth. 




V. 



Formation of Nationoids in America. 

THE marvellous loveliness and grandeur of the Amer- 
ican continent, crowned with open and free insti- 
tutions, attract, among hosts of different natures, the 
most enterprising representatives of all the races of 
the globe. Its magnificent mountains, its valleys of 
fertility and beauty, its wonderfully beautiful rivers, 
its great chain of lakes, and vast stretches of coast 
washed by two oceans, its overwhelming expansions of 
prairie-lands, its incalculable mineral wealth beneath 
the soil, its countless varieties of vegetation, its elec- 
trical climates and unrivalled skies, its total and perfect 
adaptation to the highest and broadest and deepest 



NATIONOIDS IN AMERICA. 65 

needs of humanity, constitute a continent destined to 

act magnetically upon the entire populations of the 

earth. It is a hemisphere of beauty and magnificence, of 

dazzling opulence and boundless fertilization, to which 

no description can do justice. It is open and free to 

the world, to which it sends heartiest invitation ; and 

it is, therefore, a land into which the races of the 

world are rushing with the swiftness and power of 

mighty rivers. 

The grand geographical belt of greatest planetary 

development — not many hundreds of miles wide — runs 

straight across the American continent, and proceeds 

westward until it engirdles and clasps itself around 

the globe. In the tides of the atmosphere, which 

covers and corresponds to this geologic boundary of 

maximum fertility, there floats and soars the celestial 

life of the earth. This circulatory life contains the 

germs and causes of the almost infinite possibilities of 

the globe and its inhabitants. It is impossible that 

any thing human should live in America and not be 

more or less a recipient of these atmospheric germs and 

causes. They float and infuse themselves everywhere, 

and enter the lungs and the life, and indistinctly mix 

into the character of every person. It is best to reside 

near the middle of this geologic and atmospheric belt, 

in order to achieve highest intellectual and industrial 

results ; and to this end, also, it is better to exist 
5 



66 JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 

and strive on the southern rather than upon the north- 
ern side of it ; on the principle of magnetic emanation, 
which produces a greater proportion of health and 
prosperity upon the sides of mountains and in valleys 
which openly and frankly face the wonderful sun in 
the heavens. 

All the way round the globe this magnetic and 
electrical girdle — an ethereal belt which mathemat- 
ically marks and defines the boundaries between the 
earth's two wide extremes — shows where the greatest 
human developments have been, and are at all times 
possible. All the civilizations, all the arts and sciences, 
all the best religions, have been unfolded within two 
parallel lines less than two thousand miles apart. 
Within these fraternal lines we find the brightest 
human intellects, the finest inspirations of music, art, 
and spirituality, and the grandest conquests of inven- 
tion and labor ; all set in a framework of great natural 
magnificence and loveliness of scenery, at once a feast 
to the eye and a gladness to the heart, and constituting 
a magnet of wonderful attractiveness to all the world 
besides. The history of mankind's pathway through 
the fields of its greatest achievements, and a perfect 
picture of mankind's situation and highest develop- 
ments at this moment, would in their general features 
be one and the same — a repetition of the old pioneering, 
a recitation of the old wars and struggles, a rehearsal 



NATIONOIDS IN AMERICA. 67 

of the old dramas and tragedies, a picturing of the old 
kingdoms and subjective industries — the present differ- 
ing from the past only in the minor details of new 
actors, new dresses, new scenery, and new accessories, 
developing a variety of effects before an audience of 
new spectators who, for the time being, fancy they 
are really beholding " something entirely new." 




HU3IAN ROOTS AT THE BOTTOM OF SOCIETY. 

The positive pole of the great magnetic belt of 
highest fertility, after a lapse of thousands of years, 
has so revolved and augmented its prolificating quali- 
ties as to span the American continent. It extends 
its great magnetic arms lovingly around a portion of 
Europe, and clasps its hands tenderly over the nations 
of the slumberous East. But the parallel lines never 
vary as to their distance from each other, while yet 
they are never alike in their relative positive and 
negative polarities, nor in the marvellous effect they 



68 



JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 



exert in different parts of the world upon the feelings, 
propensities, thoughts, industries, and physical and 
spiritual developments of the races and individuals 
within their reach. 




FLOWERS AT THE TOP OF SOCIETY WHO CLAIM SUPERIORITY TO THE ROOTS IN 
THE SOCIAL SOIL. 

Potential causes, which need not here be consid- 
ered, cooperate with the dynamics of this nation- 
generating belt. In the track of these causes travel 
the progressive pioneers, who, in every stage of the 
world's growth, appear aggressively in advance of 
peaceful settlements in new countries. These intrepid 
adventurers encounter manifold dangers from wild 
animals, from savages, and from an unpropitious 
climate. They reach down to the deepest roots of 
society — find native humanoids in every stage of de- 
velopment — and begin, through evil and through good, 
to build the foundations of a new nation. Thus the 



NATIONOIDS IN AMERICA. 



69 



Mayflower carried the seed-germs of new common- 
wealths, and her crew began to lay the foundations 
of a new world upon the immovable basis of " Ply- 
mouth Rock." They had no knowledge of the objects 




HOMESTEADS OF AMERICAN PIONEERS. 



of beauty or scenes of grandeur which surrounded them 
upon the immensely vast continent. They did not 
know that they were the advancing column of an 
innumerable army drafted out of all nations on the 
globe. They did not venture even to dream that they 
were to establish a new country and a new govern- 
ment that would in time occupy the highest place in 
the sight and in the faith of all races of men. 

Far from it. On the contrary, the " Pilgrim 
Fathers," with their superior characteristics for lay- 



70 



JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 



ing the foundation of a great national independence, 
were simply in quest of a place on earth where a Free 
Bible and a Free Conscience could be forever possessed 
and enjoyed. This, with comfortable homes and pro- 
ductive farms, and nothing more ! They had no en- 




A DREAM TOLD BY THE PURITAN MOTHERS TO THE PURITAN FATHERS. 

11 Too Good to be True ! " 

thusiasm ; no dreams of progression. Their dogmatic 
theology and inflexible morals, their opinionated 
bigotries and austerities, their contempt for that which 
is merely beautiful, and their reverence only for the 
downright useful and hard necessities of a prosaic life 
— all promising symptoms of powerful attributes of 
character and conquest — made them practically theo- 
cratic in their views and administration of government, 
— to flee from the wrath of which, Roger Williams, 



NATIONOIDS IN AMERICA. 



71 



the first great American Baptist, was compelled to 
seek protection and freedom in the bosom of Prov- 
idence. 




^iSS^jlS 



^ 



PURITANISM ATTEMPTS THE DESTRUCTION OP EVERY OTHER PORM OF 
INDEPENDENCE. 

In the Puritan stock we find a variety of the 
hardest and strongest elements. We are interested in 
it deeply ; because, according to the laws of hereditary 
transmission of qualities, America is entitled to a great 
career ; and because, also, there are already signs of 
the formation of many nationoids upon this magnifi- 
cent and beautiful continent. 

Inspiration burned and throbbed within the very 
heart of this new world. Not political, not social, not 
industrial ; nay, it was a religious cause that brought 
the Mayflower to Plymouth Pock. The laws and 
conditions of Truth — inspiration and aspiration of the 
Eternal Eight — are manifested, first, in Evolution, 



72 JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 

and, second, in Perception. Between the first and the 
realization of the second whole generations of men 
may come and go. Two hundred years upon the 
American soil, and yet it is doubtful whether, even at 
this day, the Perception of the possibilities embosomed 
in the Evolution of the Puritan movement by the old 
world has been reached by any mind. 

In the stock and blood at the bottom of this history 
— which is the opening chapters of an unparalleled 
career — we find elements from every advanced nation. 
German Martin Luther contributed his spiritual 
supremacy ; Bohemian John Huss donated the exam- 
ple of his sublime resistance to religious malpractices ; 
Italian Peter Waldo sent his example of loyalty to 
primitive religion ; Geneva John Calvin forwarded his 
invincibilities of doctrine concerning an unchangeable 
God ; French Huguenots proclaimed their great gospel 
of religion as a reformer of government ; Scotch Dis- 
senters contributed their high principles of indepen- 
dence of God's church ; these elements we find in the 
compound out of which is being Evolved the great 
Nationoid, which, after the gestation of many genera- 
tions, will certainly develop and establish a new type. 

At present we can behold, as a result of the over- 
flowing immigration and conjugal commingling of 
English, French, German, Scotch, Irish, Italians, In- 
dians, Africans, Chinese, &c, a kind of national com- 



NATIONOIDS IN AMERICA. 



73 



pound which may with propriety be called American' 
ode. It is a mixture not yet typical of any thing prom- 
ising — except to those who live by interior sight — for 
it is, so to say, the " protoplasm " merely of a future 
great nation. American characters are now nothing 
but humanoids ; the dough of humanity before it is 
fashioned into loaves for the oven. 

It is profitable to remember that it required a hot 
oven, and a baking period of more than twelve long 
centuries, to fashion and establish the present English 
type. Roman, Britain, Saxon, Norman, — all had to 
contribute to the new formation. A thousand years 
are consumed in the fires of progress, together with 
millions upon millions of individual human homes and 
interests ; and very soon every one forgets the time in 
the contemplation of the works accomplished. 




AMERICAN COMMERCE BEEORE THE ERA OF RAILROADS. 



The signs of a war of races in America have given 
place to premonitory symptoms of a wondrous blending 
of different physiological elements and different social, 
moral, and intellectual traits into an Americanade ; 



74 



JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 



which is filled to the very brim with executive inspira- 
tions — a compound absolutely dripping over with in- 
fallible prophecies of a type, which shall be absolutely 
unlike any thing known either in the old world or new 
— a type of character which shall bloom with perennial 
virtues, and bear the fruits of righteousness, progress, 
liberty, and spirituality. 

A new prob- 
lem is to be solved 
in this appointed 
land of beauty, 
fertility, and 
scenic magnifi- 
cence. It is to be 
the birth-place of 
a comprehensive- 
ly new blending of human with the celestial govern- 
ments.. The epoch of theology is nearing its end. 
Carpenters are at work building the cradle of the new 
uninstitutional Religion. Along with all races meet 
also all religions. They are to be melted and run to- 
gether into one conglomerate mass of historic stuff not 
good for any thing human. A prodigious revolution, 
a tremendous change in the feelings and thoughts of 
mankind in America, is inevitable, in both political 
and ecclesiastical institutions. Creeds cannot with- 
stand the pulverizing advancement of positive science. 




MECHANICS AND AGRICULTURE GO HAND IN HAND. 



NATIONOIDS IN AMERICA. 



75 



Bigotry cannot set back the on-rolling tides of universal 
Brotherhood. 




RAILROADS AND TELEGRArHS ARE KNITTING TOGETHER THE ENDS OP 
THE EARTH. 



The nationoidal condition of America, or rather 
the humanoidal stage of Anglo-Americans, will account 
for much of popular transgressions of the laws of 
peace, justice, and wisdom. The bottom laws of 
society are atrociously violated by both church and 
government. Native human roots, the Indians, for 
example, are plowed up and thrown into the sea. 
Christians, so called, commit this unrivaled iniquity, 
through the powerful enginery of government, which 
rests upon the Army and Navy. But the punishment 
for such transgressions is hastening with lightning 
speed. Scientific skepticism, under the sanction of 
highest scholars everv where, is the Nemesis which 
will crush institutionalized religion into nothingness. 



76 JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 

Protestantism may marshal its fixed moralisms, and 
may concentrate its speculative faith, against Cathol- 
icism ; and one tribe of prosaic believers, under the 
flag of the institutionalized Luther, may war with 
another equally prosaic tribe under the leadership of 
some other Protestant organization — Arminianism 
may antagonize with Arianism, and ecclesiastical inay 
war with liberal Christianity — but, behold ! when the 
great army of Ideas shall appear upon the field of 
battle, under the generalship of Philosophy, interpret- 
ing the positive facts of natural Science, then the days 
of dogmas are numbered, then the institutions of the 
so-called Christians, together with the labors of their 
administrators, heirs, and assigns, who made friends 
with injustice and with the mammon of unrighteous- 
ness, shall go down in lamentations to the caves of the 
mountains, and they shall be swallowed up by the 
earthquake, and sink forever into the desert valleys 
of inextinguishable volcanoes. 

But still another struggle is coming ! While the 
before-mentioned Americanade is being prepared in 
the matrix of the present humanoidal condition, there 
is to be a w r ondrous War of Work — a battle between 
organized Men and organized Money — a strange strug- 
gle, going forward at the same moment, on both sides 
of the two great oceans ! For the first time in the 
history of man, Labor is to become King ! The powers 



NATIONOIDS IN AMERICA. 77 

and principalities of his sovereign majesty, Money, 
will become .subjects of the heaven-ordained Prince, 




TALACE OF A GOOD AND POWERFUL PRINCE. 

who will rule triumphantly throughout both con- 
tinents. Black, red, yellow, brown, and white men, 
associated with black, red, yellow, brown, and white 
women, are to be together educated, and civilized, and 
organized into Labor Fraternities. 

Labor is just beginning to be intelligent. Free 
schools bring forth fruits of righteousness. Money is 
the hereditary King — ruling for thousands of years by 
undoubted " divine right," like the long procession of 
princes during the epochs of superstition — but, thank 
kind Heaven ! the days of Money -monarchy are num- 
bered, and the kingdom of Industry is about to come on 
earth, resting upon the everlasting foundation of Just- 
ice and Love, which are the will of the Infinite. 



78 JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 

The new Prince of righteousness will rule for a 
period upon the bottom law of all revolutions— by the 



DRILLING SOLDIERS FOR THE COMING STRUGGLE. 

invincible authority of organized Might. Monks and 
ministers shudder before this approaching crisis — 
bringing, as they contemplate the prospect, a civiliza- 
tion without morals and a religion without Christianity. 
The soldiers of Labor will not bow to institutionalized 
religion. Neither will they grope in the dark cellars 
of mere materialistic metaphysics. The free lands of 
a free country — brimfull of free schools, free bibles, 
free consciences, free reason, and free labor ! Great 
means to great ends ! A short, straight road to un- 
speakable opulence, progress, and happiness. 

There are fathers and mothers, who have been edu- 
cated to worship at the feet of the Money- Monarch, 



NATIONOIDS IN AMERICA. 



79 




FAVORITE THRONE OP THE COMING KING. 



shuddering at the thought of bringing up their chil- 
dren to Labor. But in spite of church organizations, 

and in opposition 
to the doomed 
doctrines of the 
monks and min- 
isters, the new 
civilization must 
be born. Lecky, 
in his masterly 
" History of Eu- 
ropean Morals," 
after much analytical research, says that u the civiliza- 
tion of the last three centuries has risen in most 
respects to a higher level than any that had preceded 
it. Mechanical invention, habits of industry, the dis- 
coveries of physical science, the improvements of gov- 
ernment, the traditions of Pagan antiquity, have all a 
distinguishing place, while the more fully its history 
is investigated the more clearly two capital truths are 
disclosed. The first is that the influence of theology 
having for centuries paralyzed the whole intellect of 
Christian Europe, the revival which forms the starting 
point of our modern civilization was mainly due to 
the fact that two spheres of intellect still remained un- 
controlled by the sceptre of Catholicism. The Pagan 
literature of antiquity, and the Mohammedan schools 



80 JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 

of science were the chief agencies in resuscitating the 
dormant energies of Christendom. The second fact 
is, that during more than three centuries the decadence 
of theological influence has been one of the most in- 
variable signs and measures of our progress. In medi- 
cine, physical science, commercial interests, politics, 
and even in ethics, the reformer has been confronted 
with theological affirmations which barred his way, 
which were all defended as of vital importance, and 
were all in turn compelled to yield before the secu- 
larizing influence of civilization." , 

In the composition of the nationoid, which is being 
rapidly developed at this moment in America, the 
Religion of Justice will appear like an angel of uni- 
versal salvation. 

After the War of Work is over, after Men shall be 
exalted above the highest place ever occupied by 
Money, after many ecclesiastical authorities shall have 
their offices filled by everlasting principles of Truth, 
then will there be seen a peaceful light shining from a 
realm beyond the clouds of battle ; then will come to 
all men titles to a Land higher than the highest of 
earthly aspirations ; then all eyes will behold softer 
skies bending tenderly over objects of celestial beauty ; 
then will our astronomers discover galaxies of stars 
beaming divinely upon scenes of loveliness unknown 
to earth ; then will humanity be filled with a grand 



NATIONOIDS IN AMERICA. 81 

joy, surpassing all speech, defining mankind's relations 
to one another and to the Infinite government, and 
bestowing every mind with the sublime knowledge 
that a higher, truer, more worthy existence is the in- 
heritance of every thing human. 




VI. 



The Wisdom of Getting Knowledge. 

THERE are in every community two opposing types 
of character ; which, because of their dissimilarity, 
may be classified as : (1) The Originals, and, (2) The 
Civilized. 

To the Originals all serious books, all routine re- 
straints, all aristocratic respectabilities, all artificial 
methods of education, are unspeakably repulsive and 
unnatural. Instead, they choose to give unrestrained 
gratification to the wild energy of their own wild 
powers ; to lead a life of apparent ignorance and 
worthlessness ; or, as many wisely do, choose a trade 



wisimM of getting KNOWLEDGE. 83 

or some pursuit, independently of the schools, and 
often in defiance of prevailing standards of popularity. 
The Civilizees, on the contrary, with all their 
aristocratic connections and with all their hereditary 
respectabilities, naturally and pleasantly take to popu- 
lar methods; - They become noted and gifted as intel- 
lectual book-worms ; they discourse agreeable music ; 
they glibly talk in unknown tongues ; and, at last, 
they begin to fancy themselv r es a superior race of 
mortals. 

" With finger-tip he condescends 
To touch the fingers of his friends, 
As if he feared their palms might brand 
Some moial stigma on his hand." 

: h ■'•■ j 

Originals, who kre sometimes inspirational " gen- 
iuses," are frequently the world's greatest heroes, its 
pioneers, its conquerors, and its martyrs ; while Civil- 
izees are as frequently the world's greatest impedi- 
ments, its cowards, its law-makers, and its inquisitors. 
Originals are also capable of being the solid and 
solemn bores of society ; while Givilizees are invariably 
its ornamental air-holes and accredited ministers. 
Originals begin at the roots of things ; they eat heart- 
ily and drink themselves drunk with first meanings ; . 
while the Civilizee concerns himself only and daintily 
with results. The first lives in immediate communica- 



84 JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 

tion with the forces and objects of nature ; the second 
takes advantage of centuries of " experience," and 
feeds his fastidious wants from the great discoveries 
and inventions in the sciences — astronomy, geology, 
medicine, mechanics, the industrial and the fine arts. 

By slow degrees the Original learns the rudiments 
of astronomy ; how the starry bodies change with the 
seasons ; how the rain and the shine of the sun affect 
the germination and development of vegetation ; and 
the heavenly lights become points on the brilliant face 
of his chronometer ; while the Civilizee saves himself 
the trouble of observation by carrying a watch ; by 
buying an almanac, a book on flowers and agriculture, 
and reading the outlines of popular astronomy. And 
thus, in the course of generations, along with intellect- 
ual culture comes a weak and superficial multitude, 
making a new stock of Originals absolutely essential 
to further progress. 

These inevitable Originals, in their countless crudi- 
ties and by their barbarian disregard for all the kid- 
glove-and- sugar-tong proprieties, appear frequently 
like mountebanks, false prophets, and quacks. But 
this, for the most part, is an appearance only. They 
reject with scorn the accumulations of book-knowledge, 
and set out resolutely to dig for the roots of things ; 
they have a powerful gravitation toward the founda- 
tions and essentials of knowledge. 



WISDOM OF GETTING KNOWLEDGE. 85 

Thus human nature, ever and anon, reasserts itself. 
Through a thousand palpable blunders, through hun- 
dreds of assumptions and egotistic assertions, the Ori- 
ginal strikes the key-note of a new departure. .The 
first medicine-men were shepherds, who observed the 
habits of diseased animals among herbs and roots of 
the fields ; the first physiologists were the sacrificing 
priests, who observed the conditions of the organs of 
the slaughtered animals ; the first real astronomers 
were the outcast soothsayers and reputed charlatan 
astrologers of the most ancient tribes of mankind. 
Said James Martineau : " The first party of painted 
savages, who raised a few huts upon the Thames, did 
not dream of the London they were creating, or know 
that in lighting the fire on their hearth they were 
creating one of the great foci of Time." Those painted 
savages were Originals ; they laid the broad founda- 
tions of the subsequent civilizations. " All the grand 
agencies which the progress of mankind evolves are 
formed in the same unconscious way. They are the 
aggregate result of countless single wills, each of 
which, thinking merely of its own end, and perhaps 
fully gaining it, is at the same time enlisted by Provi- 
dence in the secret service of the world." 

We ought by this time, I think, to demand a type 
of character superior to either now known — a type 
founded and unfolded upon harmonial principles ; in 



86 



JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 



which Originality is essential, with its inspirable 
spiritual susceptibilities, and with its great automatic 
working energies — a type, in which there is an irre- 
sistible flow toward a loftier Civilization, through the 
medium of inventions and the arts— a type with its 
great powers scientifically and gracefully educated — 
in shortest phrase, a type, in which both the best 
material and the best spiritual meet and bloom into 
personal harmony, manifested in society through a 
healthy will and worthy works, endowed with abilities 
adequate to comprehend and help forward the higher 
ends and purposes of the present grand world. 




MAGICIANS CHANGING IRON INTO FORMS OF USE. 



A better type of character will come, I am im- 
pressed, with a truer, more natural system of educa- 



WISDOM OF GETTING KNOWLEDGE. 87 

tion. But in the present volume this truer educational 
system must not be particularly explained. 

Brazen boastfulness, flippant irreverence, and out- 
rageous effrontery, combined with great natural abili- 
ties and industry, sometimes characterize strong, inde- 
pendent, original minds ; while, on the contrary, the 
book-made and scholastically disciplined minds, regu- 
lated by the graceful laws and brilliant accomplish- 
ments of education, habitually exhibit nobler traits and 
address themselves to more agreeable qualities in their 
fellow-men. 

What, let me ask, is the essential difference between 
these two apparently antagonistic characters ? The 
difference, I think, is not essential. In simple truth, 
the difference is best illustrated by two equally good 
dwellings: the one painted, pictured, carpeted, and 
furnished ; the other left destitute of these attractions 
and advantages, neglected by every fine art, since the 
day it was pronounced " finished " by the architect ; 
or the same as the difference between two fruit-trees 
— the one left to grow and bear as best it can in its 
native, original wildness ; the other trimmed and fed 
and cultivated by a scientific and purely conscientious 
pomologist. 

" I consider a human soul," said Addison, " without 
education, like marble in the quarry : which shows 
none of its inherent beauties, until the skill of the pol- 



88 JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 

isher fetches out the colors, makes the surface shine, 
and discovers every ornamental cloud, spot, and vein, 
that runs through the body of it. Education, after 
the same manner, when it works upon a noble mind, 
draws out to view every latent virtue and perfection, 
which, without such helps, are never able to make 
their appearance. 

" If my reader will give me leave to change the 
allusion so soon upon him, I shall make use of the 
same instance to illustrate the force of education, 
which Aristotle has brought to explain his doctrine of 
substantial forms, when he tells us that a statue lies 
hid in a block of marble ; and that the art of the stat- 
uary only clears away the superfluous matter and 
removes the rubbish. The figure is in the stone, and 
the sculptor only finds it. 

u What sculpture is to a block of marble, education 
is to a. human soul. The philosopher, the saint, or the 
hero, the wise, the good, or the great man, very often 
lies hid and concealed in a plebeian, which a proper 
education might have disinterred and brought to light. 
I am, therefore, much delighted with reading the 
accouuts of savage nations ; and with contemplating 
those virtues which are wild and uncultivated : to see 
courage exerting itself in fierceness, resolution in ob- 
stinacy, wisdom in cunning, patience in sullenness 
and despair. . . t To return to our statue in the block 



WISDOM OF GETTING KNOWLEDGE. 89 

of marble, we see it sometimes only begun to be 
chipped, sometimes rough hewn, and but just sketched 
into a human figure ; sometimes, we see the man ap- 
pearing distinctly in all his limbs and features ; some- 
times, we find the figure wrought up to great elegancy ; 
but seldom meet with any to which the hand of a Phi- 
dias or a Praxiteles could not give several nice touches 
and finishings." 

Education, therefore, when it is absolutely true — 
when it is grounded in the mental susceptibilities, 
and conducted scientifically, with philosophical fitness 
to the limitations of the pupil's mental constitution — 
when the range and variety of lessons coincide with the 
range and variety of the natural powers, and not, as 
in popular establishments, be multiplied and hastened 
in proportion to the capacity and retentiveness of the 
Memory and the culpable ambition of parents — then, in 
very truth, education is a blessing beyond all speech, 
because it is indispensable to individual success in this 
life, to say nothing of the solid happiness and progress 
to the spirit which true education, like a good angel, 
brings to the throne of the intellectual and moral powers. 

A chapter on the philosophy of education is not 
appropriate in these pages ; inasmuch as this book is 
designed as a vestibule, with entertaining nooks and 
ravines, and instructive, talkative streams flowing 
through, opening upon something still better within 



90 JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 

the temple ; and yet, just here, let me express my im- 
pression, in brief, that Education, when true and 
genuine, is acquired with delight and joy, on the law 
of recurrence or repetition. The faculties of thought, 
like the hands and feet, become truly educated by 
means of frequently circling repetitions of ideas, apti- 
tudes, actions, and conditions. Acquisition, in other 
terms, is an effect of repetition, upon the principle that 
" habit becomes second nature." 

The Rights of Childhood must be recognized and 
respected by parents, guardians, and teachers ; quite 
as much, in justice, as the Duties of Childhood, which, 
also, must be early inculcated and steadily enforced. 

A few propositions may induce thoughtful and 
earnest investigation, and may result in wise action, 
not less, concerning, 1. The borning ; 2. The treat- 
ment ; and, 3. The training of children. All parents, 
the rich and the poor alike, should, because they can, 
recognize and fulfil the following, as their Children's 
Bill of Rights : 

First A healthy physical and mental organiza- 
tion from birth ; thus, by the law of hereditary trans- 
mission, anticipating the fallacious " regeneration " 
inculcated by religious schemes. 

Second. A rational physical and mental educa- 
tion, both at school and in the home ; thus, by the law 
of progressive development, giving the child a fortune 



WISDOM OF GETTING KNOWLEDGE. 



91 



infinitely richer and more substantial than untold 
millions of gold and silver. 



?S38?S 




A FATHER ENCOURAGING HIS SON TO ATTEND SCHOOL. 



One bottom-truth must be learned by parents and 
acted upon, to wit : Perfect and most expensive 
schools, and wisest and most honored teachers, cannot 
undo the evils imparted to children in homes where 
the corrective influences of justice and kindness are 
disregarded, and where the fundamental laws of phys- 
ical health and mental growth are violated day by 
day. 

The School constitution is essentially different from 
the constitution of the Home. Therefore, the relation 
of teacher to pupil can never be identical with the 
relation subsisting between parent and child. And 
yet it is necessary for the young that the school gov- 
ernment and the home government should correspond 



92 JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 

in every essential. No tyranny is more absolute than 
parental government without parental love ; which 
fact is fully manifested in every seminary or college 
where the corps of teachers and professors assume the 
relations and responsibilities of parents to the pupils 
put under their charge. Such a government is founded 
upon rules, laws, and a programme of requirements 
enforced by marks of dishonor, penalties, and suspen- 
sions ; to escape which, the pupils, simply because 
they are not regulated by an appeal to their individual 
sense of honor and responsibility, invent every imagin- 
able phase of falsehood, duplicity, and insubordination. 
In the absence of parental love, there can be no re- 
demptive justice in parental government. An appeal 
both to parents and to the civil laws of the land, by 
school teachers and college professors, in cases of 
insubordination and flagrant disobedience, would work 
far better than the system of private whippings, black- 
in arking, suspensions, expulsions, &c, at present pre- 
vailing in various institutions. 

Parents and grandparents usually delight in the 
possession of u smart children." Conscientious teach- 
ers, on the other hand, wisely dread this shallow and 
supremely vicious ambition. If a child-boy can behave 
in company just " like a little man," or if an infantile 
girl can strut and simper before folks " just like a little 
lady," then the boastful parents, swollen with the 



WISDOM OF GETTING KNOWLEDGE. 93 

vapors of extreme silliness, smile upon them with ex- 
ceeding satisfaction. 

Therefore, in these rushing days, spontaneous child- 
hood has quite disappeared behind the innumerable 
smart things, witty sayings, and dignified ways of 
" young folks," known in literature as our little men 
and women. 

Inasmuch as a perfect copying or imitation of 
" grown people" is the popular demand by parents 
upon professional and conscientious teachers, why may 
we not at once introduce, as head-schoolmaster, an 
original embodiment of the science ; so that our smart 
children may be exceedingly amused, while learning 
in early years to " put away childish things," and 
while studiously acquiring the interesting personal 
habits and manners of superannuated humanity ? 

A story illustrating this imitative propensity, is 
told of three little girls who were playing among the 
poppies and sage-brush of the back yard. Two of 
them were making believe keep house, a little way 
apart, as near neighbors might. At last one of them 
was overheard saying to the youngest of the lot, 
u There, now, Nelly, you go over to Sarah's house 
and stop there a little while and talk as fast as ever 
you can, and then you come back and tell me what 
she says about me, and then I'll talk about her ; and 
then you go and tell her all I say, and then we'll get 



94 



JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 



as mad as hornets, and won't speak when we meet, 
just as our mothers do, you know ; and that'll be such 
fun— won't it I " 




A PROFESSOR OP THE ART OP IMITATION. 



~:iC:li- 



Boys imitate men as naturally as one robin sings 
like another. The dissipation and excesses of con- 
vivial fathers — their gambling-amusements, their rum- 
drinking, their tobacco-chewing, their smoking and 
snuffing, their silly vulgarity and filthy profanities — 
all these are copied by most all boys who see and hear 
such men and fathers. Youth convey these danger- 
ous mental habits into schools and colleges. And 
sometimes, notwithstanding the frequent interposition 
of heavenly guardians to save them, the magnanimous 
young heart and the fine intellectual brain, once beauti- 
ful with the grand hopes and sweet promises of child- 
hood, are wrecked and broken upon the dismal shores 
of error and misdirection. 



WISDOM OF GETTING KNOWLEDGE. 95 

" A startling example of the results of college dissi- 
pation is given in the Life of the Eev. Kichard Harris 
Barham, the witty author of the famous ' Ingoldsby 
Legends.' A fellow-student of Barham's at Brasenose 
College, Oxford, had plunged into dissipation and in- 
volved himself in heavy debts. Unfortunately there 
are great facilities for doing so at that university and 
in a lesser degree at Cambridge, owing to the long 
credit offered by the tradesmen. His l duns ' were 
upon him. His father had assisted him so frequently 
that he had declared on the last occasion he would 
do so no more. The crisis had come. He must have 
money to satisfy his creditors, or he would be expelled 
and ruined. He penned a last appeal to him, ending 
his letter with an oblique but unmistakable threat of 
self-destruction if his request were refused and he did 
not receive the amount by return of post. The terri- 
fied father did not even trust to the post-office, but 
hurried with his letter containing the required remit- 
tance to the guard of the mail-coach, to whom he gave 
a guinea on receiving his solemn promise that so soon 
as the gates of Brasenose should be opened next morn- 
ing he would deliver the letter into the hands of his 
son. The guard, on the strength of his guinea, got 
intoxicated on reaching Oxford, and many hours after- 
wards stumbled up the old staircase with the letter in 
his hand. Here an awful sight met his view. The 



96 



JETS OF NEW MEANIxVGS. 



student, who had despaired of assistance, when the let- 
ter-bag had no answer for him, now lay dead upon the 
floor of his own chamber, weltering in his own blood 
and with the pistol by his side. This tragic episode 
in college life so affected Barbara that he abandoned 
fast living and entered the clerical profession, a step 
he had never contemplated before." 







IMITATION OF A BAD EXAMPLE IS A MONKEY'S TALENT. 



When the mind masters any thing, it takes a cer- 
tain hue or tendency from the quality of such knowl- 
edge. The impressible brain, being the headquarters 
of a constant succession of thought-excitements and 
thought- discharges, takes the shape and character of 
that knowledge which rules all the lesser sensations 
and thoughts. Repetition of feelings, and sensations, 
frequent associations with the same persons and 
actions, stamps and moulds the mind inevitably. 



WISDOM OF GETTING KNOWLEDGE. 97 

Useful knowledge in general is that kind of knowl- 
edge which de-spiritualizes the mind ; it is persistently 
anti-metaphysical, having little regard to changes and 
states of the internal consciousness, from which these 
master materialists " evolve " nothing ; and yet, in 
some of our highest institutions, what is called " useful 
knowledge " is in reality nothing but theory-building 
and word-learning at the expense of the pupil's health 
and memory. 

A cultivated woman, who is now a teacher in one 
of the public schools of New York, says that, when 
she was subjected to an examination at the High 
School, a proposition or question was put, thus : " The 
word Nice / spell and parse it ; give the derivations ; 
state the various meanings, and give examples of their 
use." This having been done, and the word traced 
back to six or seven languages, and its dozen different 
shades of meaning seated and exemplified, the Exam- 
iner then asked, " Is there another word similarly pro- 
nounced ? if so, go through it." ISTot one of the girls 
knew about it, whereupon the Examiner, looking as 
wise as an owl, referred them to the word " Gneiss " 
— signifying a stratified primary rock, such a mere 
geological term that it has not been into the ordinary 
dictionaries until lately, and crowned this exhibition 
of his own knowledge, by giving a bad mark to every 

person in the class. 

7 



98 JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 

At a recent examination of boys for the Central 
High School, a number of hard words — regular puz- 
zlers, most of which they would probably never be 
called upon to use in the whole coarse of their after 
life — were given them to spell : such are diaphragm, 
Cotopaxi, Guayaquil, and Afghanistan, 

The questions in Grammar, sensible and practical, 
were evidently put to ascertain the limit of the candi- 
dates' knowledge. The candidates were then put 
through, in Mensuration. We do not see why the 
youthful mind should be burdened with the acquiring 
a knowledge of mensuration, unless the pupil intended 
to become an engineer. Rational parents would pre- 
fer to have the boys made good and ready arithme- 
ticians and thoroughly acquainted, in such a business 
world as this, with the science of boot keeping. 

"We should like to know the use of telling how 
to " define a parallelopipedon, a rhomboid, and a 
prism ? " What use to any boy or man in ordinary 
life is it, " when the solidity of a sphere is 47.71305 
inches," to state what its convex surface is ? Or, when 
" a pole was broken off in a storm, the broken part 
resting upon the upright, and the top on the ground 
27 feet from its foot, the upright part measuring 36 
feet," to work out the sublime problem of " what was 
the length of the pole ? " These questions, it seems 
to us, though they may weary and haply puzzle a class 



WISDOM OF GETTING KNOWLEDGE. 



99 






of boys, belong, in most instances, to the magnificent 
Society for the Diffusion of Useless Knowledge, might 
be dispensed with, in favor of something more practi- 
cal and useful, in accordance with individual needs. 
What is needed is simply this — a good, sound educa- 
tion, which will fit its possessor for the practical work 
and purposes of life, and yet give a foundation for high- 
er acquirements, should talent or circumstance render 
them necessary. Bet- 
ter a few things thor- 
oughly learned, than 
many pretentious ac- 
quirements imperfect- 
ly or flashily obtained. 
To return to our 
definition of " Ori- 
ginals." The follow- 
ing wholesome bit of 
autobiography — from 
the faithful pen of 
that educated " Ori- 
ginal," the pastor of 
Plymouth Church — 
is submitted here as 
an honest illustration : 




STUDYING IN A HEALTHY PLACE, BUT IN AN 
UNHEALTHY POSTURE. 



" Did you like to go to school ? " 



100 JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 

" No, sir, I did not. I detested it — all its pre- 
cedents, all its accompaniments, and all its sequents." 

But this applies only to the primary schools. The 
academy and the college furnished many hours which 
are to be remembered with gladness ; the early schools 
not one. They were engines of torture, devised ex- 
pressly to make good boys unhappy, and seldom do 
contrivances succeed so well. Let us see, — the first 
school that we remember was Miss Collins's. Deacon 
Collins lived on the green, southeast of old Litchfield's 
old church. Up-stairs we climbed, we remember that ; 
on a long bench we sat, with our feet dangling in the 
air, and a tall, kindly-faced woman there was. But 
besides, we remember nothing — of book, slate, or reci- 
tation. 

Next we went to Miss Kilborne's, on the west side 
of the square, and of this school two things stand forth 
in memory ; — first, that the wind on this high hill used 
almost to take us into the air ; the wind that seemed 
never to be done with blowing. It blew high and low. 
It swept along the ground, slamming open gates, 
whirling around corners, pushing us against the fence, 
and then into the ditch, — a little fat, clumsy boy, that 
hardly feared any thing visible, but dreaded all mys- 
teries, and shook with vague and nameless terror at the 
roar of the wind up in the high tree-tops — the great 
elm trees that swayed and groaned as if they too were 



WISDOM OF GETTING KNOWLEDGE. 



101 



in cruel hands. The other memory of this school was 
of sitting wearisomely for hours on a bench, and swing- 
ing our little legs in the air, for want of length to reach 
the floor. Yes, two other things we recall — one, a 
pinch on the ear, and the other a rousing slap on the 
head, for some real or putative misdemeanor, and a 
helpless rage inside in consequence. But of lessons, 
knowledge, pleasure, there is nothing. The picture is 
blank. Not a word of tenderness — not one sympathiz- 
ing, coddling act, not the sight of a sugar-plum, which 
in that day would have been to us more beautiful than 
the stones of the walls of the Heavenly City. Oh, why 
did they put such tempting candy in long glass jars, 
and set them in the windows, to put little wretches in 











RECOLLECTIONS OP THE OLD SCHOOL-HOUSE. 



such a fever of longing, and to make them so un- 
happy ! How many times have we walked the long 



102 JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 

road to school looking all the way on the ground, in 
hopes of finding a cent. Such things had happened ! 
Boys there were in our own neighborhood who had 
found cents along the road, and even a sixpence in one 
case. There was a rumor that twenty-five cents in 
one instance had turned up. But we never heeded 
that. Had a quarter been lost, the whole town would 
have been searched as with a lighted candle, and no 
boy would have been left the luck of finding it. Still 
the story acted on the imagination like an Arabian 
Night's tale. But over against that window — was it 
Buell's store ? — he never gave us a particle of candy, 
and so his name rests uncertainly in our memory — 
over against that store we paused full often, and im- 
agined that the day might come, — what things had not 
happened that seemed extravagant to think of? — when 
we should set up a store, and keep candy, and have a 
right to put our hand in just when we pleased ! 

We liked to have done ourselves a wrong, in saying 
that we learned nothing. We know distinctly that 
Harriet one brilliant morning plucked dandelions and 
taught us how to split them and roll them up into 
curls. It has been a great comfort to us many times 
since. 

Our next school was Miss Pierce's. It was a 
ladies' school. We were sent thither to be under the 
care of elder sisters. We don't recollect a single reel- 



WISDOM OF GETTING KNOWLEDGE. 103 

tation. For days together we were regarded as a mere 
punctuation-point, not noticed unless dropped out of 
place, or turned upside down. Mr. Brace — father of 
C. L. B. — used to pass by and look at us with a know- 
ing face, and snap his finger in a significant way — 
without a word. Bat that mysterious snap was good 
for ten minutes' propriety and sometimes for even half 
an hour. 

Once, for laughing out loud at somebody's fun — 
one had only to put his tongue in his cheek, or to 
point a finger at us, to set off that laugh which always 
lay pent-up waiting for deliverance — we were tied to 
the leg of the bench. The acute pain of shame pierced 
like a knife — a kiss cured it. For a kind-faced girl, 
one of the elder young ladies finishing her education 
there, looked upon our tearful eyes and scarlet-blush- 
ing misery, took pity on us, put a soft hand on our 
head and stooped and kissed us. If a cup of cold 
water to a thirsty child shall bring an immortal bless- 
ing to the giver, how much more a warm kiss to a 
crying child unable to defend itself against shame ! 
May the angels lay their hands upon her as she dawns 
upon heaven, and kiss from her face every tear and 
sorrow of the sad world behind her ! 

All experiences of children are evanescent — and few 
sorrows have they that are not drowned in the first 
sleep, dead as Pharaoh's host in the Red Sea. The 



104 JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 

school was not expected to teach, us, and it fulfilled 
every expectation. Our time was in danger at home 
of raveling out in mischief, and the school was a mere 
basting thread to hold down the hem of good behav 
ior. Next went we to the district school. 

Not a tree ! Not a bush ! Only a stone wall on 
one side and a board fence on the other. No window 
blinds. The summer sun beat down full upon the 
small, rough, unpainted school-house. Here we learned 
to catch flies — to crook pins for boys to sit down on, 
and from which they always arose with alacrity. If 
any man wishes to know what spontaneity is, let him 
sit down on a well-prepared pin. We learned the 
rudiments of the cost of u carrying on "—an art of the 
largest proportions, and which in schools, academies, 
and colleges is amply taught, whatever else is omitted. 
Our bearing was very humble. We could make a cat's 
cradle under the bench unseen. We could look on a 
book seemingly in study for half an hour without 
seeing a word. We learned how to make paper spit- 
balls and to snap them across the room with consid- 
erable skill. But beyond these interesting branches 
we do not think we ever learned a thing, Why should 
we ? Is it possible for a boy of six or eight years in 
the school-prison, with no incitement and no help, 
from four to six hours a day, and with all out-doors 
beating on the sehool-house, streaming in at the win- 



WISDOM OF GETTING KNOWLEDGE. 105 

dows, coming, in bewitching sounds, through every 
crack and crevice, to be studious, regular, and exem- 
plary ? A good, village, primary school ought to be a 
cross between a nursery and a play-room, and the 
teacher ought to be play-mate, nurse, and mother all 
combined. One teacher we had, young, pale, large- 
eyed, sweet of voice, but not prone to speak — bless her 
— why must she have consumption and one day dis- 
appear ? And the next day, behold, in her place a 
tall, sharp, nervous, energetic, conscientious spinster, 
whose conscience took to the rod as a very means of 
grace ! The first one would have made us love and 
obey her. We were even beginning. From the 
second we were marvellously delivered. 

" Mother, I don't want to go to school." 

" You don't wish to grow up a dunce, do you, 
Henrv ? " 

" Yes, marm." 

" What ? Grow up like a poor, ignorant child, go 
out to service, and live without knowing any thing ? " 

" Yes, marm." 

" Well, suppose you begin now. I'll put an apron 
on you, and you shall stay at home and do housework. 
How would you like that ? " 

" Oh, do, ma." 

Sure enough, we were permitted to stay away from 
school, provided we would " do housework ; " and all 



106 JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 

summer long our hands set the table, washed dishes, 
swept up crumbs, dusted chairs, scoured knives ; our 
feet ran for errands, besides the usual complement of 
chores in the barn. 

But, oh, did we not glory in the exchange ? Yes, 
and in the long summer afternoons, when nothing 
more was left to do, did we not allow a good aunt to 
lead us along those paths of learning which before our 
feet eschewed ? 

Great is our zeal for common schools, and disinter- 
ested. For we are not biased in favor of primary- 
schools by one single pleasant memory connected with 
them. They lie in our memory as cunningly devised 
engines for putting poor, little, innocent, roguish boys 
to torment because they are mercurial, fun-loving, and 
impatient of restraint." 

A great many years after the experience embodied 
in the foregoing bit of autobiography, the same honest 
hand traced the following philosophical sentences, con- 
cerning the true and natural law of character-building, 
beginning with the discipline of children : 

" I knew it would never do to give it up ; the boy 
would have been ruined ; I felt horribly, but I kept 
on, for I knew that his will must be broken, then or 
never." Young teachers in their first school, and 



WISDOM OF GETTING KNOWLEDGE. 107 

young parents training their first child, come to some 
such crisis, and talk of it afterwards in words like the 
above. After the crisis is past, and when the event 
comes up for review, the parties to it are not always 
sure whether the result was a great blunder or a great 
victory. Authorities differ. 

A man with a broken back is usually quiet and 
sweetly submissive ; and if the back be sufficiently 
broken he gives very little trouble to his rulers or to 
his fellows beyond a decent burial. Now, will is the 
backbone of character. To break one's will, or even 
to subdue one's will by force or violence, is a very crit- 
ical operation. To break a backbone judiciously, be- 
longs to high-art in surgery — very high. 

An ingenious device to control a runaway horse is 
to shoot him ; a pistol for this purpose can be attached 
to the head-stall, between the ears, and a string from 
the trigger to the driver's hand puts the most wilful 
animal completely under control. 

The desirable end to be sought in the matter of 
wills or horses, is intelligent obedience. Enforced obe- 
dience is the proper result of breaking a will or a 
horse. Intelligent obedience is the result of intelligent 
education. In certain ranges of conduct, all men learn 
obedience, invariably. A hearty boy-baby is a natural 
born rebel. But he very soon recognizes his patient 
and passionless masters, the great stone- faced laws of 



108 JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 

matter. The sober mahogany table hit the boy as he 
got up from the floor, and his toys. Straightway the 
boy kicked the table-legs and fisted its corners. But 
the table was in no degree excited by the crisis. As 
often as this rebel wishes to try conclusions with the 
table, the table is quite ready with its lesson. Two or 
three lessons are usually enough. The boy turns out 
for the table, and respects it ever afterward. 

So the stove has its lessons ; the hot lamp-chimney 
it's ; the flight of stairs, down which baby wishes to 
roll many times, has a lesson ; the hole in the carpet 
trips the careless toe with passionless punctuality ; 
aching fingers teach the law of snow and snow-ball- 
ing ; cut fingers teach children not to meddle with 
edge-tools. If any parent or teacher will accept the 
wisdom taught by these laws of matter and of nature, 
he will find similar results to attend upon his efforts 
as he stands in the way of a child to guide and educate 
and govern. Victory is not to be won by a pitched 
battle. Let any child experience an absolute uniform- 
ity of law and administration, and sooner or later he 
will conform. He learns to recognize parents and 
teachers, not as occasional foes and opposers, but as 
existing facts — the same yesterday, to-day, and every 
day. Penalties need not be severe, but they must be 
inevitable. Rewards need not be costly, but they 
must be earned, and when earned punctually awarded. 



WISDOM OF GETTING KNOWLEDGE. 109 

When an artist, by a few bold, strong strokes 
makes a likeness, it is usually a caricature. The por- 
trait, life-like and soulful, is worked up by ten thou- 
sand microscopic touches, all of them guided by a mas- 
ter's eye. And when a child is to be educated, there 
may be educational geniuses, who, by a few bold 
words or blows, at critical moments, shape a character. 
But the perfect work is accomplished by them only 
who, by daily little touches, all loving and all con- 
sistent, work up a result, which, after years of perse- 
verance, we call success, for we have been workers with 
God, and have worked as He works." 

So thinks one who loves little children and lives 
in the life of childhood. 

But concerning the internal principles and attrac- 
tive methods of true education, as developed in the 
Progressive Lyceum System, much more remains to 
be written, which makes the following chapter neces- 
sary to both the reader and the subject. 




VII. 



The Children's Progressive Lyceum. 



THE Plymouth pastor, with a candor characteristic 
of the plenitude of his wholesomeness, testifies 
that he has " not one single pleasant memory " con- 
nected with primary schools ; they lie in his recollec- 
tion " as cunningly devised engines for putting poor, 
little, innocent, roguish boys to torment ; " and even 
the ever-grateful Whittier, reviewing the shadow- 
shapes of memory, recalls the patient old country 
pedagogue — 



THE PROGRESSIVE LYCEUM. 



Ill 



"In that smoked and dingy room, 
Where the district gave him rule 
O'er its ragged winter school." 

But, O, believe me, kind reader, a higher revela- 
tion has dawned upon the world. As there is an 
octave of colors, and an octave of sounds, higher than 
those which come within the range of purely physical 
eyes and ears, and therefore unknown, because invisi- 
ble and inaudible to ordinary humanity ; so is there a 
system of physical 
and mental culture 
higher than any 
thing now indi- 
cated or known 
in the popular 
world of educa- 
tion. [No philoso- 
pher ever imag- 
ined the possibil- 
ity of making per- 
fect men and 
women out of boys 
and girls as they 
are at present in- 
structed and mis- 
educated. The 
methods of mo- 




WISDOM'S WATS ARE PLEASANT, BUT CANNOT BE 
ENTERED BY VIOLENCE. 



112 JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 

ther Nature are generally misconceived, or else en- 
tirely ignored, by the powers that be. 

Compare the trifold organization of the little child 
— the foundation of the future man or woman — with 
the world's educational methods, and at once you dis- 
cern the causes why children dread to attend either 
public or private schools. For the same reason they 
dread shoes that pinch their tender feet, or garments 
that aggravate because they do not fit and meet the 
demands of their young and sensitive bodies. A true 
mechanic makes his machinery exactly to accomplish 
the end and uses which originally fired his ambition 
and inspired his understanding. Sucli a mechanic, 
true to the laws of his noble science, works to one 
great point : To accomplish the largest and best results 
by his invention, with as little noise, with as little fric- 
tion, with as little wear and tear and expense,- as is 
possible in the nature and constitution of things. 

Judged by this standard, what must the wise think 
of those who invented our public system of education ? 
Its manifold violations of the laws of mental economy, 
its unadaptations to the organic constitution — occasion- 
ing unspeakable aggravations and terrible losses, by 
a succession of exasperating frictions upon childhood 
and its forming character — all this transcends the 
largest monstrosities in the realm of mechanical ab- 
surdity. 



THE PROGRESSIVE LYCEUM. 



113 



I have adduced the testimony of a few of our best 
thinkers against existing methods ; therefore, your 
verdict must correspond, and the crudities of the popu- 
lar schemes must be condemned, while better methods 
are being instituted. 

The higher octave of harmonies, and the magnifi- 
cent scale of adaptations — to which I have just at- 
tracted your attention — are just now known among a 
few advanced minds, and is called u The Children's 
Progressive Lvceum." 

Watch the nat- 
ural and involun- 
tary workings of 
your own mind, 
when you are most 
sincerely like a 
child, and you 
will immediately 
come to a correct 

l-nATT'ln/ln.o nf f"ka CHILDREN rS'TTjITIVELY LOOK AWAY FROM BOOKS 

Knowledge 01 ine TO objects in nature. 

unfailing princi- 
ples and beautiful methods urged by mother Nature. 

Here, in this volume, an analysis of this celestial 
plan and method is not deemed appropriate. The in- 
vestigator can find it, in bold outline, in a little book 
bearing the expressive name of the system. But it is 

in order here to affirm that its high birth and corre- 
8 




114 JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 

sponding adaptations are congenial to the whole life 
of children. 




THE NEW SHIP CALLS FOR NEW BUILDERS. 

The immortal spirit is the fountain. The everlast- 
ing waters of this fountain are its principles of love. 
The final coherent manifestation of these principles, in 
their totality, is called wisdom. The growth of wis- 
dom is from within, outwardly, by the attractions of 
congenial methods. Wisdom implies roundness, or a 
perfect balance and wholesomeness (holiness), includ- 
ing the normal development and exercise of the bodily 
powers. Wisdom means also the growth and system- 
atic cultivation of the social, intellectual, and spiritual 
elements and powers of individual existence. And it 
is most religiously believed that the methods of the 
Lyceum are, in every particular, adapted to the exact 
and complete accomplishment of these sublime personal 



THE PROGRESSIVE LYCEUM. 115 

ends and uses. Therefore, it has been and is presented 
in grand outlines, with all its imperfections and un- 
regulated details, as the most loved plan, best known 
in loftier worlds ; of which the grouped harmonies of 
the physical universe, in their cohesions and varied 
beauties, are but an outward revelation. 

Under a republican form of government, the most 
important question is education. The true Mind- 
Builder is the true architect of the Republic. Unedu- 
cated parents do not appreciate the advantages of 
education ; while impoverished parents cannot afford 
to educate their children. The first bring up their off- 
spring in heedlessness and vices ; the second put them 
to distraining and remunerative hard work. Public 
schools and compulsory education are consequently 
demanded. The Republic has a vested interest in the 
mind and body of every person. And true education 
is at the bottom of all true progress in a government 
constituted like ours. A clearer comprehension of 
some of the ideas and plans I would urge, may be 
derived from a synopsis : 

1. The mind is built and individualized from germs 
implanted before birth ; therefore, true education is 
from within outward — e duco, to draw out — by attrac- 
tion rather than by compulsion. 

2. The thinking powers, through numberless repeti- 



116 JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 

tions of effort in one direction, acquire the habit of 
clear-thinking in that direction. A great variety of 
impressions may be received during a period of extra- 
ordinary cerebral susceptibility ; but strength and 
cohesion and availability are at length sacrificed to the 
" variety " and the " celerity " of the acquisition, and 
the mind is certain to be debilitated to its very roots. 

3. The operations of the human mind, like the 
operations of all other great organs in nature, are 
rotary and revolutionary, or over and over again, in 
circles of endless recurrence, with a spiral ascending 
movement toward a climax or crisis, which is the true 
basic principle whereby the thinking powers and 
memory can be practically and enduringly educated. 

4. A true process would naturally develop a de- 
lightful feeling of sympathy between preceptor and 
pupil — a kind of sacred friendship ; which would open, 
and keep susceptible, the heart and mind of the child, 
investing the school-room and the very presence of the 
teacher with a charm in the highest degree favorable 
to government and education. 

5. The true process is from within outward, by 
means of conversation on all objects and subjects with- 
in the scope of the child's observation, attraction, and 
natural abilities. The objects of the mineral, vege- 
table, animal, and human kingdoms are clustering on 
every side about the pupil. The rudiments of knowl- 



THE PROGRESSIVE LYCEUM. H7 

edge are delightfully imparted and acquired by this 
sweet oral intercourse between preceptor and child. 
After a certain degree of learning has been attained, 
by this process, the teacher may employ books, charts, 
diagrams, black-boards, instruments, illustrations of 
the arts and sciences, and every other reasonable auxil- 
iary, to augment the mind's healthful progress and at- 
traction toward practical knowledge. 

6. Healthful progress means a correct development 
of the entire physical structure along with the culture 
of the purely social, mental, and moral. The Egyp- 
tians, Persians, Greeks, Asiatics, Romans, gave strict 
attention to the culture of the bodies of their favorites. 
All children in a true Republic are " favorites," and 
nothing is too good for either their physical or mental 
organization. For the purpose of complete physical 
culture, loose-fitting garments are of preeminent im- 
portance for our boys and girls. 

7. All time spent in studying antiquated languages 
is lost beyond redemption. Classical studies, so called, 
are valuable to those who desire knowledge of the 
poetry, mythologies, theologies, speculations, dreams, 
and fables of long-ago-dead epochs. The great living 
world reaps little nourishment from mind-crops grown 
twenty and thirty centuries ago. 

8. Teachers and mothers ought to be paid the 
highest salaries. Mothers are prime-sources of agen- 



118 JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 

cies engaged in modelling and building the young im- 
mortal, and they should be aided by fathers in cooper- 
ating with teachers in the mind-developing process, for 
which schools were established. Those who teach 
the youngest children ought to be most liberally re- 
munerated. No position involves greater responsibil- 
ities. Little children demand the highest order of 
talents, and the profoundest powers of self-discipline, 
and a stock of long suffering patience ; and every rea- 
sonable inducement should be offered to those rare 
persons, "both male and female,", who can and do 
every day lovingly mingle with, control, refine, and 
educate the tenderest and youngest minds. 

9. It is impossible for one teacher to justly educate 
a large number of children at the same time. Lyceum 
groups are consequently limited to twelve members. 
Experience and philosophy uniformly testify that no 
one teacher can rightfully control and culture any 
larger number. It is a short-sighted and immoral 
economy which insists upon crowding into one school- 
room and under one teacher a mass of children moved 
by conflicting ages and temperaments. 

10. The school and the family must cooperate, and 
not, as now, antagonize ; with different teachings, 
different examples, and different methods of discipline. 
Home religion — the only religion which is pure and 
undefiled — is morality practised throughout every 



THE PROGRESSIVE LYCEUM. H9 

twenty-four hours. The joys of family are the fruits 
of righteousness. The spiritual influenced well-ordered 
home upon society is like that which angels exert upon 
strangers in the celestial habitations. Home religion 
is a " means of grace " to all who gather harmoniously 
in a circle of friendship and love, around the genial 
fireside sanctuary. 

11. Sweet and pure home-amusements, with uni- 
form parental kindness and a due respect for the indi- 
vidual rights and private trials of each juvenile mem- 
ber, is the certain counter-attraction to vicious haunts ; 
the only prevention to save the young from the eve- 
ning dissipations of bar-rooms, billiard-saloons, club- 
houses, and the select party card-table. 

12. Heart-development should keep step with the 
growth of the intellectual powers. Grace in the affec- 
tions lends beauty to the face and sweetness to the 
body. One cardinal grace is sincerity, which is the 
key to enduring and perfect confidence ; sincerity, the 
only power that can open, and keep open, the wise 
and magnanimous heart ; sincerity, the only influence 
that can develope the impulses and characteristics of 
children into sweetest and wisest ways. 

13. Happy the father and mother whose children 
love their home better than the quarrelsome ways and 
discordant amusements of the street. Professional and 
strictly literary men, and fathers accustomed to great 



120 JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 

business cares, are apt to neglect their children in their 
sports and recreations. 

14. Children love to hear true stories, and to look 
through books filled with suggestive illustrations. 
There is a wonderful educational power in the mute 
language of pictures. The young are keenly and spon- 
taneously alive to the things of sense. Their growing 
bodies demand wholesome exercise, fresh air, healthy 
food, plenty of sleep, and easy-fitting garments. 

15. Conversation is more educational than books. 
Object-teaching is, therefore, the surest primary 
method of imparting knowledge. It is the privilege and 
the prerogative of parents to select teachers, schools, 
books, objects, scenes, stories, and entertainments. 

16. Kindle a bright fire in your beautiful home. 
Do not circumscribe the harmless plays, nor crush too 
suddenly down the noisy sports of your children. 
Check nothing with impatience. Approve every 
thing, except that which inflames some dangerous 
appetite, or disturbs the sacred rights and harmonies 
of the household. 

17. In another particular the school and the home 
should be harmonized : Let equal rights and equal 
responsibilities be in all relations the ruling principle. 
The unjust world gives into men's hands the power to 
make laws and the might to execute them. This plan 
is founded upon the ancient barbarian doctrine that 



THE PROGRESSIVE LYCEUM. 121 

" might makes right." Women and children are 
taught and commanded to obey. 

18. But a new light has come into the world. Just 
and wise men no longer believe in the inferiority of 
women. And they now believe in the Rights of Chil- 
dren ! Men and women naturally stand side by side 
as brothers and sisters, and as fathers and mothers, and 
neither should infringe upon the other's existence, 
liberties, or happiness. 

19. And the same principle of exact divine justice 
is applicable to the treatment and government of the 
servants and other dependents in your home. They, 
inevitably, have sore trials and annoyances inseparable 
from their incessant labors. Their estate of servitude 
is frequently the effect of social misfortunes — of purely 
evanescent circumstances — consequently, one frequently 
meets servants, who, by organization, possess finer feel- 
ings and exhibit nobler intellectual faculties than those 
more pecuniarily fortunate ones for whom they are 
compelled to labor. They are usually deficient in the 
graces of book-education ; therefore they exhibit fee- 
ble, or eccentric, or wild understandings. Hence, with 
ardent temperaments, servants are quick in personal 
pride and resent with passion any real or fancied 
wrongs. Housekeepers and unjust mothers unwitting- 
ly cause a large part of the terrible discords in their 
working departments and nurseries. Selfishness is at 



122 JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 

the root of the social Upas. Children receive a mis- 
education for life from the mal-practices and vicious 
examples prevailing in the realm of father and mother. 
20. In a word, the Alpha and Omega of the whole 
harmonial gospel of education is to develop harmoni- 
ously both the body and the mind ; and to this end 
there must exist a harmony between the methods of 
the School and the methods of the Home. 




VIII. 



Lyceum Teachings for Children. 



WISDOM'S ways, although infinitely diversified, 
and immeasurable in their sweep, are yet in- 
variably peaceful and pleasant. 

But if scientists demand additional ovidence to 
establish the theory that man's ancestors were savage 
inhabitants of the wilderness, one might adduce the 
existence of that active instinct in human nature, 
whereby most persons manage to avoid the paths of 



124 JETS 0F NEW MEANINGS. 

Wisdom and choose instead the absurd, conflicting, and 
unspeakably miserable ways of Folly. 

What evidence does a man possess when he is 
physically right ? He is physically happy. What 
evidence, when he is mentally and morally right ? He 
is mentally and morally happy. How does he know 
that his ways are wrong and foolish? He is incon- 
sistent, quarrelsome, restless, and miserable. When 
he walks in Wisdom's ways, how does he know ? His 
life is coherent, peaceful, harmonious, and progressive. 
Effects and causes, being bound together by the ties of 
fellowship, are logically and inseparably married. 
Their fruit are legitimate offspring. 

The least logical reflection, it seems to me, will con- 
duct any consistent mind to the conclusion, that " Ob- 
servation " is the president, as Memory is the treasurer, 
of all sensuous knowledge. The physical senses out- 
rank intellect, during the early years of every one's 
life ; just as, during this life, intellect is permitted to 
outrank Intuition, which is the constitutional author- 
ity of spirit consciousness. 

Soul lives like an atmosphere, in an elementary 
condition, within the senses ; the spirit, fully organ- 
ized, live within the soul ; the eternal, impersonal 
essences live within the spirit. 

Therefore, in children as well as in adults, the 
senses are first in the election canvass. They are first 



LYCEUM TEACHINGS. 125 

to proclaim their " inalienable rights " upon all occa- 
sions and under all circumstances. Not trammelled 
with humility, but emboldened by that amusing, in- 
corrigible audacity which is natural to intrinsic igno- 
rance, they nominate themselves as legitimate candi- 
dates for the highest offices in the gift of universal 
Knowledge. In truth, to do them exact justice, we 
must say that the senses are " wonderfully made," and 
that they instinctively know that they are certain to 
be elected on every straight ballot. They ascend fear- 
lessly and rule with power upon all the thrones of 
Knowledge ; because, simply, they have an indisputa- 
ble title to " the divine right of kings." 

After them (the five royal bodily senses), comes the 
modest sovereign grand master within the temple — the 
immortal Spirit. The best is always last to come. 
Spirit, being highest of all, arrives last of all. It 
comes silently with the host of lesser lights, marching 
with the long procession of experiences, which contrib- 
ute so largely to individual development. 

Forever, in this material world, the senses will take 
precedence of both the soul and the spirit, in the acqui- 
sition of knowledge, and in the conduct of life. 

On philosophical principles, therefore, you should 
begin to teach yourself and your children to take the 
first step just right — to observe with accuracy. 

Names and the uses of things, clothed in accurate 



126 



JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 



words, certainly follow in the path of accurate observa- 
tion. Correct verbal or written descriptions of things 
are impossible without a basis of correct inspection of 
the things themselves. 



...u^ii'ifi 




TEACHING YOUNG LADIES THE NAMES OF THINGS. 

Children take notice first of the forms of things ; 
next of the colors / next, of differences / next, of re- 
semblances ; lastly, of uses, or rather of the relations 
of things to each other and to the bodily sensation. 

Objects accurately cognized by the senses awaken 
corresponding thoughts in the mind ; and this is the 
absolute basis of all true knowledge ; and the method, 
if adopted by the world's educators, would be uni- 
versally recognized and approved as the pleasant ways 
of Wisdom. 

Suppose, just here, at the very fountain, we try an 



LYCEUM TEACHINGS. 



127 



experiment. Mary's perception and observation of 
things are uniformly more accurate than William's. 
Therefore, her descriptions are invariably more reliable 




III1M 



WILLIAM AND MARY IN CONVERSATION. 



and always more interesting than his. Now, for a trial 
of your discerning and analytical powers, O most 
friendly reader ! Taking cognizance of the picture of 
William and Mary, let me ask you : Do you discover 
therein more than six different forms % Are there less 
or more than ten objects in the picture ? Let us 
look : Girl, boy, pillars, platform, horses, driver, car- 
riage, fence, trees, shrubbery, birds, open window, and 
a spectator. 

1. How many objects ? 

2. Where are they ? 

3. What are they called ? 

4. What are their uses ? 



128 



JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 



Thus an object lesson is begun. Let us proceed 
upon this principle. The mental budding, the graft- 
ing, the exquisite novelty, and the enchanting delight 
accompanying the fruition, will astonish and richly 
reward every parent and teacher. " Show us a phi- 
losopher," writes a close observer, " show us a sage 

that a child cannot puz- 
zle. We have never 
seen any such phenom- 
enon. .Roll all the wise- 
acres of the world into 
one, and a school-boy's 
whys and wherefores 
shall confound the com- 
bination. If, when the 
Admirable Crichton tra- 
velled through Europe, 
affixing his challenges 
to the gates of colleges, 
the professors had pit- 
ted their six-year-olds 
against the prodigy, we 
warrant they would have 
propounded problems 

FROGS LEAPING FROM THE OLD OAKEN DeyOnCL 111S SKlll tO SOlVC 
BUCKET 

The truth is, that it is 
much easier to answer a learned man than a child. 




LYCEUM TEACHINGS. 129 

Tour philosophers understand well enough that there 
are matters concerning which all men are equally 
ignorant, and with commendable tact and prudence 
they steer clear of them. But children are bold and 
persistent querists. They are not satisfied with evasive 
replies. They cross-examine with merciless perse- 
verance, and sometimes drive the most profound to the 
refuge of ' I don't know.' 

" But even that confession — so humiliating to 
grown-up wisdom — does not always silence the youth- 
ful searcher after knowledge. He is apt to think you 
ought to know, and to ask why you donH know. "We 
really like to set a smart child on a pedant. It is 
astonishing how the little interlocutor will worry and 
badger the man of books. But it does him good. It 
teaches him how much he does not know. It is very 
foolish for any man to give himself airs on the score of 
acquirements which do not suffice to save him from 
being cornered and convicted of ignorance by a mere 
babe." 

The complete justice of these reflections can be 
easily manifested. Place, for example, before your 
child any picture you may select for observation and 
analyzation ; or, take any familiar object in nature — 
an apple, a turnip, a kitten, a dog, a horse, a table, a 
flower, a leaf, a pin, a piece of bread and butter ! 
Now interrogate your darling, or induce your pupil 



130 JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 

freely to ask questions. Alas ! how rapidly you slide 
down the inclined plane from the summit of conceit to 
the dead barren bottom level of ignorance. The ex- 
ceeding little which you really know concerning the 
elements of truth contained in a horse, or a pin, would 
astound and humiliate a far greater mind than yours. 
How many ages elapsed, how many myriads of men 
have been and gone, before a pin was made ? Whence 
and how is the pin-metal obtained ? By what ma- 
chinery is it rounded ? and pointed ? and headed ? and 
prepared so rapidly in rows for the market ? When 
is a pin better than a nail or a needle ? 

All the time you must intelligently remember, 
that to develop correct habits of observation, by means 
of correct interrogations and conversation, is funda- 
mental to and inseparable from a true education. 

Look at the next picture ; describe in good lan- 
guage all you see in it. Give the correct names and 
the known uses of all things visible. Do you discover 
any animals ? If so, how many ? What is the man 
doing at the well ? Why does he want water ? With 
what does he draw the cooling fluid ? Why does he 
look so astonished ? What is that just leaping from 
the bucket ? What is the difference between a frog 
and a toad ? What do they eat ? Are they poisonous, 
or harmless ? What difference in color ? in habits ? 
in places they occupy in Nature ? 



LYCEUM TEACHINGS. 



131 



To show by example how to do any thing is worth 
a thousand times more than to teach, by mere words 
and silly platitudes, how it ought to be done. The lady 
of the house, instead 



of telling her igno- 
rant young working 
maid how she ought 
to inspect eggs just 
brought in from the 
grocery, does far bet- 
ter by just going in- 
to her kitchen and 
showing the observ- 
ing maid, by exam- 
ple, exactly how to 
shade the egg in her 
hands, while holding 

it between her eyes and the bright sunlight, in order 
to determine the exact condition of the otherwise un- 
certain object. 

What is the color, of an unhealthy egg, when thus 
examined ? 

What its appearance, when fresh and sound ? 

What is the name of the shape of an egg ? 

What is the difference between an oval and an 
ellipse ? (Consult the first chapter in this volume.) 
Show with your pencil the two forms, and their unlike- 




A HABIT OP OBSERVATION. 



132 



JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 



ness and resemblances, and correctly write the name 
of each mathematical figure under your drawings. 

Look at the picture again, and tell how mcmy ob- 
jects you see ? 

And where they are ? 

And their names ? and their uses ? 




A PICTURE FULL OF MEANING. 



Whatever a healthy-minded child sees he wants 
immediately to know all about. Who is good and 
wise and patient enough to answer a bright child's 
ever-recurring questions ? Every thing relating espe- 
cially to animals and plants marvellously excites fehe 
infantile and juvenile senses ; thence, that is, from the 
sensations and reports of the senses, in regular succes- 
sion, is developed and strengthened the imagination 



LYCEUM TEACHINGS. 133 

reason, and intuition, and the well-trained faculties of 
memory and judgment. 

The quickness of the eye and ear, and the readi- 
ness of the reasoning and remembering faculties to 
receive and elaborate impressions, depend upon the 
natural temperament and the fitness of the organiza- 
tion. In these respects the difference between chil- 
dren, born of the same parents, is sometimes world- 
wide and irreconcilable. Nevertheless, in every case 
imaginable, whether the organization be defective or 
propitious, every born child is susceptible to considera- 
ble rudimental education by this attractive method. 

The young mind is accessible from every side of its 
existence. Its electrical sympathies flow out first 
toward what is most attractive and congenial to its 
own immediate wants. Objects with bright colors 
first ; then things, which satisfy hunger, with especial- 
ly attractive flavors ; thirdly, things animated, for any 
thing in motion is intensely attractive ; next, how 
various things are used by papa, or by mamma ; then 
sounds, even harsh concussions, become essential to 
infantile happiness. A child will throw aside the most 
delightful playthings to listen to novel noises from 
whatever source. All these propositions, as funda- 
mental to the education of the sensibilities and the 
development of the knowing faculties, must be self- 
evident to every thinking mind. 



134 JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 

In this fountain volume, small as it is, you can find 
pictures, and jets of new meanings — or representations 
and signs of things — sufficient to test the truth of this 
theory, and to lay the foundation of your child's true 
and lasting education. Make yourself thoroughly the 
master of the thoughts awakened by an accurate ob- 
servation of the pictures ; then, in a simple and concise 
manner, with fewest possible words, which you should 
be willing to repeat an hundred times, if necessary, 
and thus you are prepared to teach. 

Take an apple : (1) its form ; (2) its color ; (3) its 
flavor ; (4) its uses ; (5) its resemblances ; (6) its 
origin ; (7) the Divine love and wisdom, as manifested 
in its adaptations to the wants of mankind. 




A PRACTICAL LESSON IN SAILING VESSELS. 

Children and youth are constantly asking for 
change, variety, and novelty. They immediately drop 



LYCEUM TEACHINGS. 135 

one thing for another, and they ask and long for vari- 
ety and inconsistency throughout all their waking 
hours ; because, to be brief, their mental impressibil- 
ity is superficial, while their sensuous activity is un- 
controllable. Motion is a safety-valve in the quick life 
of the young. It is, therefore, impossible for a child 
to think consecutively upon any one subject, or to feel 
long from any cause for joy or sorrow. In the system 
of the Progressive Lyceum, which is the child's most 
natural school, complete provision is made to meet 
childhood's imperative and just demand for diversion 
and recreative change. Children naturally need to 
drop the consideration of a lesson — they even need to 
abandon impulsively for a time the most delightful 
amusement — so that they may return to it with fresh- 
ness, and feel the joy and appetite awakened by the 
original attraction. 

In conclusion, a word : Parents, guardians, or teach- 
ers who are not constituted and trained so that they 
can comprehend children — can take pleasure in their 
incessant changeabilities, and with gentle patience give 
audience to their ever-recurring questions — are suita- 
ble for neither of the high offices designated, and ought 
to assign their functions and places to individuals 
rightly and appropriately organized. 

Wisdom's ways are always beautiful. They are as 
perfect in the simplicities of children as in the pro- 



136 JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 

fundities of maturity. But, alas ! how few there are 
who enter in at " the strait gate " which opens upon 
the temple of Truth, surrounded by the immeasurable 
gardens of God, and traversed by the eternal paths of 
pleasantness and peace. 




IX. 



Imagination as an Educational Force. 



IT must not be inferred, from the principles so 
warmly advocated in the preceding chapter, that 
my impression is to exalt object-teaching above every 
other method. Children do not always remain in the 



138 



JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 



juvenile stage. A few years convey them to where 
their enlarged and kindling powers demand higher 
methods of thought and expression. Objects teach 
children to comprehend the meaning and uses of lan- 
guage. " In old times," says Ruskin, " men used 
their powers of painting to show the objects of faith ; 
in later times they used the objects of faith that they 
might show their powers of painting." But during 
the period of youth the quickened imagination — whose 
office is to perceive truth and to picture ideas upon the 
reasoning faculties — as an educational force calls for 
new fields of exercise. By this spiritual power the 




WHERE CHILDREN LEARN TO READ, WRITE, AND CIPHER. 



mind is lifted above the persistent downwardness and 
materialism of the senses. 



IMAGINATION AS A FORCE. 139 

Imagination, as was stated in the Penetraua, is im- 
portant as an interior clairvoyant. Its practical work- 
ings and benefits, as aids to intellectual and spiritual 
development, are scarcely more than barely recognized. 
Much less is it believed to be the fountain which feeds 
all the mental powers. Without imagination the facul- 
ties cannot be reached and developed ; while with it, 
as an active educational force, the whole mind may be 
made to blossom and to bear immortal fruit. 

Old schoolmasters in the old schoolhouses adhere 
blindly, or with opinionated obstinacy, to the old-time 
methods as presented in the old books by the old au- 
thors. Often the conservative utilitarian teacher, sus- 
tained by the yet more unprogressive commissioners 
and ignorant parents in his district, refuses to impart 
any thing beyond the dry facts of " reading, writing, 
and arithmetic." The reading of each pupil in such a 
school is exasperatingly monotonous — without taste, 
without grace, without ideality, without expression — 
because the method of teaching is without the en- 
kindling force and grasp of imagination. 

Mental and spiritual culture, without the inspiring 
flame of the imagination, is impossible. As well at- 
tempt to run machinery without lubricating oil. 

Of all the wonderful genii — surpassing any mon- 
ster you. ever read of in the u Arabian Nights " of long 
forgotten ages— the modern locomotive is the most 



140 



JETS OF NEW MEANINGS 



perfect. But it was first perceived by the imagina- 
tion. It came up out of the vapors within the en- 
chanted chambers 
of the mind. Then 
the inventor began 
to describe his im- 
aginings by tongue 
and pen ; and at 
last, which was 
surpassingly best 
of all, he embodied 
his " ideas " in 
steel, iron, wood, 
and brass. And 
now behold, O ye 
favorites of For- 
tune ! behold, 
throughout the en- 
tire prolific belt 
of civilization, the 
powerful genii which the first man evoked from the 
vapors of his imagination ! 

The human mind, especially when youthful and 
alive to Intuition, is a wondrous world of beauteous 
pictures. It is a complete pantheon of divine powers 
and high purposes; within itself a gallery of God- 
painted scenes, beycmd the language of the tongue to 




A MIGHTY MACHINE BORN IN IMAGINATION. 



IMAGINATION AS A FORCE. 



141 



portray. Young persons, with such impressible organ- 
izations, quickly acquire a reputation for " story-tell- 
ing," which is twin-sister 
to "falsehood;" and 
strange to say, both are 
well-born, being first cous- 
ins to mankind's sublime 
faculties of " invention," 
without which the world 
could make no positive 
advancement in science, 
mechanism, and art. 

Thus you comprehend 
that the human spirit is 
a wonderful compound of the young mind is a repository 

r OP PICTURES. 

impersonal principles — a 

fearful arrangement of impressible faculties — which 
incessantly call for gratification, and for the most wise 
dramatic discipline. 

Pictures within the mind — that is, the inwrought 
possessions of the imagination — call for pictures adapt- 
ed to the pleasure of the senses. Modern educational 
literature is an example of this proposition. Latest 
issues of school-books teem with pictorial illustrations 
of positive excellence as works of art. Every depart- 
ment of creation is brought forth and minutely de- 
scribed in words and pictures. For purposes of educa- 




142 JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 

tion diagrams, maps, and pictures appeal suggestively 
to both the senses and the imagination. 

Science is lifting the veil, and the practical mys- 
teries of Truth are rapidly surplanting the bewildering 
fancies of supernaturalism. No creed-breaker is more 
ruthless, no iconoclast is more heartless, than are the 
chariots [mowing machines] and palaces [iron foun- 
dries and factories] of our scientific and driving era. 
Mournfully it has been said that " there is nothing 
sacred now. The last holy of holies has been invaded 
and desecrated. One of the Pharaohs is a mummy in 
Barnum's Museum. A mountebank travels over 
Europe with a little tent in which he exhibits for four 
sous ' a piece of the Holy Cross.' Where the genii of 
the ' Arabian Nights' Entertainment ' once reigned 
supreme, there is now a ten-cylinder Hoe press print- 
ing the Koran and a ' History of the Caliphs.' A 
news-boy has a stand near the ruins of the Coliseum, 
and old ladies peddle peanuts in the streets of Jerusa- 
lem. A factory has been established on the river Jor- 
dan. Recently the cable informed us that a railroad 
track is being laid upon the classic plains of Marathon, 
and now comes the startling announcement that a tele- 
graph station is being located on the site of what is 
supposed to have been the original ' Garden of Eden ! ' " 

Pictorial school-books are food for the imagination 
through the senses. Eight millions of American boys 



IMAGINATION AS A FORCE. 



143 



and girls demand an annual production of twenty mil- 
lions of books and primers. The great publishing 
warehouses are stacked with food for the vast armies 
of children. From floor to ceiling, and all through the 



'*%*&& 




BOYS IMITATE MEN IN BUILDING THE WALLS OF SOCIETY. 



great length of the stores, you behold beautiful caskets 
of really useful knowledge. Science has brought in 
new text-books and advanced methods of instruction ; 
but greater improvements and higher developments 
are yet to come. 

From Thorndale, concerning the use of science, 
comes wisdom in these words : " Some poets, in their 
verses, have lamented the inroad which science will 
occasionally make in their favorite associations, or pre- 
dilections. A weak lament. Speaking largely, the 
more we know of nature, the more beautiful it be- 
comes. Who has not felt that such knowledge as he 



144 



JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 



had acquired of physiology and comparative anatomy 
(remote enough at first from aesthetics) has ended by 
throwing a fresh grace over every limb, a fresh charm 
over every movement in the animal creation ? As to 
the vegetable world — as to our trees — I have not skill 
enough in language to describe the mystery and en- 
chantment which modern science — whether of light, 
of chemistry, or of vital growth — have filled them with 




AN ENTERING WEDGE IS NECESSARY IN EVERY NEW QUESTION. 



for me. Their leaves, as they rustle, seem to murmur 
of the half-told secrets of all creation. And take this 
with you : As science advances, each object, without 
losing its individuality, speaks more and more of the 
whole ; and this — because each living thing gets some 
beauty from the harmony disclosed in its own struc- 
ture." 



IMAGINATION AS A FORCE. 145 

The true educator may be known by one thing : 
He or she seeks to u call out " the mind's natural 
powers, and to improve and harmonize upon its con- 
stitutional adaptations. 

A true reader is one who reads with the eyes of the 
imagination. Imagination is necessary to give ideas 
their true meaning and emotions their true expression. 
Tones are sounds awakened either by thoughts or 
feelings ; which act upon memory and the imagina- 
tion ; which, in their turn, act upon and give expres- 
sion to the vocal organs. 

On this dramatic law children unconsciously take 
on the feelings and perfectly imitate the tones of voice 
they day by day associate with in the homestead. " I 
know some houses," says one writer, " well built and 
handsomely furnished, where it is not pleasant to be 
even a visitor. Sharp, angry tones resound through 
them from morning till night, and the influence is as 
contagious as the measles, and much more to be 
dreaded. The children catch it, and it lasts for life. 
A friend had such a neighbor within hearing of her 
house, and even Poll Parrot has caught the tune, and 
delights in screaming and scolding, until she has been 
sent into the country to improve her habits. Children 
catch cross tones quicker than parrots, and it is a much 
more expensive habit. Where mother sets the exam- 
Die, you will scarcely hear a pleasant word among the 
10 



146 



JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 



children in the play with each other. Yet the disci- 
pline of such a family is weak and irregular. The chil- 
dren expect just so much scolding before they do any 
thing they are bidden, while in many a home where 
the low, firm voice of the mother, or a decided look of 
her eye is law, they never think of disobedience, either 
in or out of her sight. Oh, mothers, it is worth a great 
deal to cultivate that i excellent thing in woman,' a 
low, sweet voice. If you are ever so much tried by 
the mischievous or wilful pranks of the little ones, 
speak low. It will be a great help to you, even to try 
and be patient and cheerful, if you cannot wholly suc- 




1 EVERY WOMAN BECOMES A MADONNA BY THE CRADLE OF HER FIRST- 
BORN CHILD." 



ceed. Anger makes you wretched, and your children 
also. Impatient, angry tones never did the heart 
good, but plenty of evil. You cannot have the excuse 



IMAGINATION AS A FORCE. 147 

for tliera that they lighten your burdens, for they only 
make them ten times heavier. For your own, as well 
as your children's sake, learn to speak low. They will 
remember that one tone when you are under the 
willows." 

Conceiving ideas and making them a part of you, 
putting " yourself in his place," and giving correct 
expression to emotions, are effects and exercises impos- 
sible without aid from the imagination. The faculty 
of imitation, as well as the power to conceive origin- 
ally, is substantially one and the same. The spiritual 
attributes of character, in both old and young, nat- 
urally appear in actions physical and dramatic. 

Memory in every mind is furnished with dramatic 
dreamSj events, and situations. Thus Douglas Jerrold 
exclaims : " Blessed be the hand that prepares a pleas- 
ure for a child, for there is no saying when and where it 
may again bloom forth. Does not almost every body 
remember some kind-hearted man who showed him a 
kindness in the dulcet days of childhood ? The writer 
of this recollects himself at this moment, as a bare- 
footed lad, standing at the wooden fence of a poor little 
garden in his native village, while with longing eyes 
he gazed on the flowers which were blooming there 
quietly in the brightness of a Sunday morning. The 
possessor came forth from his little cottage ; he was 
a wood-cutter by trade, and spent the whole week at 



148 



JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 



his work in the woods. He had come into the garden 
to gather flowers to stick into his coat when he went 
to church. He saw the boy, and breaking off one of 
his carnations — it was streaked with red and white — 
he gave it to him. Neither the giver nor the receiver 
spoke a word, and with bounding steps the boy ran 
home. And now here, at a vast distance from that 
home, after so many events of so many years, the feel- 
ing of gratitude which agitated the breast of that boy 
expresses itself on paper. The carnation has long 
since withered, but now it blooms afresh." 




DREAM OF A QUARRELSOME LITTLE BOY. 



Thus life's events gradually assume dramatic com- 
binations in the memory. Dreams, for the most part, 
are dramatic (sometimes tragical) exercises of the un- 
sleeping imagination. The faculties work and do at 
night what they think and fancy in the daytime. A 



IMAGINATION AS A FORCE. 



149 



boy dreamed out "what he had long wanted to see : His 
favorite dog kill three troublesome mice. At night 
the whole mind is at liberty to picture, upon its own 
memory canvas, the forms of eyes and faces aud fea- 
tures before unthought of and unknown. 

Endlessly diversified are the activities of the imagin- 
ation. Attention is cultivated and disciplined quickest 
by training the mind to accurately imagine any object 
or scene. Tou cannot truthfully and graphically de- 
scribe any thing in language or by pencil, unless you 
first clearly imagine and picture to yourself its shape, 

size, color, nature, hab- v 

its, &c. A new breed of .^m^SS 
domestic fowl, for exam- 
ple, cannot be pictured 
by you to a friend unless 
your imagination is first 
fixed upon the entire cor- 
rect appearance of the 
feathered bipeds. 

This perception of the 
form is the picture focalized upon your memory. If 
you would imitate accurately, you must imagine exact- 
ly. This rule is infallible. If you fail in conception, 
you will certainly fail in execution. Bring your atten- 
tion to a focus, then think from that as a starting 
point, from which you make a new departure ; and the 




PERCEPTION OP FORMS. 



150 



JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 



result will infallibly reveal where you need develop- 
ment, and where repression ; in order to symmetrically 
unfold your intellect, and to bring out the full powers 
of your spirit. 

In reading, as a part of education, the tongue, 
which should be governed by a well-disciplined imagin- 
ation, gives ex- 
pression in 
tones to ideas 
and feelings. 
But why should 
not the same 
discipline b e 
extended to the 
eye, the face, 
the posture, the 
attitude, and 
the gestures ? 
How, otherwise, can the whole body and mind be 
harmoniously cultured and disciplined ? Parts of the 
pupil's existence, if not cultured, will remain in a state 
of unproductive ignorance. Those uneducated parts, 
even if they do not produce evils, will act like heavy 
manacles in after life upon the individual ; than which 
there are no more serious material embarrassments to 
personal happiness and success. If you leave a young 
person's voice uneducated, or his hands and feet with- 




STRUGGLING FOR A NEW DEPARTURE. 



IMAGINATION AS A FORCE. 151 

out training, you leave him with grave disqualifications 
for a successful career. 

The Progressive Lyceum System, be it remembered, 
provides for the dramatic exercise and symmetrical 
culture of both mind and body. The imagination is 
appealed to as a great educational force. Harmonious 
physical movements regulated by musical sounds, and 
various disciplinary amusements at stated intervals, 
lend enchantment to the otherwise unspeakably tedious 
trials of acquiring useful knowledge. Daily drill in 
an unimaginative method of training the young mind 
— which method is in the programme of every impor- 
tant educational institution — is certain, in effect, to 
develop an extremely useful, yet crude and ill-man- 
nered, population within the bounds of civilization. 
By such method mankind are enriched in the imme- 
diately practical, but impoverished exceedingly in 
every ennobling and spiritualizing manifestation. 

The harmonial plan is, I trust, by this time, made 
sufficiently apparent : The mind's native powers must 
be called out, marshalled, drilled, and strengthened ; 
the Will must be taught to grasp and to hold ; the 
attention must be fired with the intention of accuracy ; 
the faculties of Reason must be plied with ideas of 
largeness and proportion ; and the Imagination, with- 
out which mind can achieve nothing, must be vivified 
with truth ; in brief, our whole human nature must be 



152 JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 

unfolded, and made to exemplify divine love and wis- 
dom — in their most beautiful, as well as in their most 
practical forms, adapted to the present world and its 
manifold demands. 

But in this treasure-grasping age, when the passion 
of avarice and the prince of extravagance drive up the 
same avenue together, all my words concerning living 
" a life of love and wisdom " must seem superlatively 
imaginative. Schemes for acquiring property would 
doubtless attract more immediate attention. The pop- 
ular creed consists of two words : " Material Prosper- 
ity." Thus thought a writer who offers the follow- 
ing rules for becoming a millionaire : 

1. You must be a very able man, as nearly all mil- 
lionaires are. 

2. You must devote your life to the getting and 
keeping of other men's earnings. 

3. You must eat the bread of carefulness, and you 
must rise early and lie down late. 

4. You must care little or nothing about other 
men's wants, or sufferings, or disappointments. 

5. You must not mind it, that your wealth involves 
many others' poverty. 

6. You must not go meandering about Nature, nor 
spending your time enjoying air, earth, sky, and 
water ; for there is no money in it. 

7. You must not distract your thoughts from the 



IMAGINATION AS A FOKCE. 153 

great purpose of your life with the charms of art and 
literature. 

8. You must not let Philosophy or Keligion engross 
you during the secular time. 

9. You must not allow your wife or children to 
occupy much of your valuable time or thoughts. 

10. You must never permit the fascinations of 
friendship to inveigle you into making loans, however 
small. 

11. You must abandon all other ambitions, or pur- 
poses ; and finally — 

12. You must be prepared to sacrifice ease, and all 
fanciful notions you may have about tastes, and luxu- 
ries, and enjoyments, during most, if not all, of your 
natural life. 

The foregoing rules (which originally appeared in 
the Galaxy)^ illustrate the truth of the ancient pro- 
verb : " It is easier for a camel to go through the eye 
of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the kingdom 
of God." 




X. 



Prophetic Dreams and Visions during Sleep. 

STRANGE to say, almost all men, even metaphy- 
sicians, are deficient in real knowledge of the 
sublime possibilities of human nature. Knowledge, 
which is derived through the senses, is limited at any 
one time by the manifested degree to which the mental 
powers have attained by their activity and prolifica- 
tions. 

It is impossible that an ignorant, narrow, idle mind 



PROPHETIC DREAMS. 155 

should consecutively think any wise thoughts ; and it 
is equally impossible that such a mind should, during 
sleep, dream any wise and comprehensive and signifi- 
cant dreams. 

This is true in principle, because the mind conveys 
itself bodily, with all its conditions and habits of think- 
ing and feeling, into each and every state of which it is 
susceptible. Thus, whether asleep or awake, whether 
at rest or in self-conscious action, the individual, with 
his ruling affections and intellectual and moral charac- 
teristics, is irresistibly and unfailingly present. 

You cannot part company with yourself; no, not 
even by the wicked folly of u suicide." 

Spiritually minded persons, therefore, unless labor- 
ing under physical derangements, are most likely to 
dream concerning spiritual and beautiful things. 

The latent capabilities of such a mind may become 
suddenly illuminated. The mysterious panorama of 
circumstances, as it is with wonderful velocity unrolled 
within the transphysical realm, " cast their shadows " 
among the thoughts of the impressible dreamer. In 
spite of ordinary rules of reasoning the mind of such 
a dreamer is profoundly affected. 

Rev. John Hall, in an article to the New York 
Observer, gives a striking illustration of premonitory 
dreaming : " Sometimes depression is the witness with- 
in one's self of actual, impending trouble and sorrow, 



156 J E TS OF NEW MEANINGS. 

sometimes coming we know not how, sometimes a 
prophecy that fulfils itself. One notable case of this 
kind may be mentioned. Twenty years ago, the late 
Alexander Stewart, a Free Church minister, was called 
to the most influential charge in Edinburgh, and all 
the church said, Go. Only his own feeling was against 
it. Modest, gentle, and loving retirement, he shrank 
back from it. Yet he dare not please himself. Will I 
not be more useful in Edinburgh, though I lived only 
three months, than if 1 remained in Cromarty three 
years, indulging my own* ease and feelings while God 
forsook me, because I forsook both Him and the path 
of duty ? But he felt he was not to live there. Af- 
ter his Presbytery had released him, Dr. Buchanan 
accompanied him home, and, noticing his depression 
as he walked along the street, he said to Mr. Stewart, 
4 You look as if you were carrying a mountain on your 
back.' i Ko, Dr. Buchanan/ was the reply, ' I am 
carrying my gravestone on my back.' And he never 
entered on the new charge, dying of fever before his 
settlement." 

Dreaming prophetically is not a common expe- 
rience ; because the prophetic gift is rare. 

A mind accustomed to thinking consecutively and 
habitually in an orderly manner, is best qualified to 
catch and retain the regular logical succession of night- 
time impressions. But an unbalanced thinking and 



PROPHETIC DREAMS. 



157 




PROPHETIC VISIONS IN THE STILLNESS OF 
NIGHT. 



dream-brain, like that of the abnormally-minded De 
Quincy, while he was under the diabolical influence 
of opium, sees objects 
absurdly enlarged, or 
magically dwarfed, 
and grotesquely situ- 
ated. The thrilling 
realities of pleasure 
and pain, and the in- 
definite number of 
experiences natural to 
a succession of months 
and years, are some- 
times pressed upon 

one's susceptibilities between the setting and the rising 
of the sun. But the next day's labors, cares, and sensa- 
tions — save in the most essential repositories of the 
spirit — drive such dreams into the realms of forgetful- 
ness. Only apparently so, however ; for, among the 
faculties, a memory, a dream, of it all remains. And 
hence it is that in the tranquil hours of future dream- 
ing, which is a dramatic form of recollecting, whether 
by night or by day, vague reminiscences of personal 
experiences in dreamily remote times, as of some pre- 
existent life in long-forgotten ages, rise up mysteriously 
in the recesses of the private consciousness. Some 
minds are so peculiarly constituted as to experience 



158 JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 

at night a kind of involuntary periodical introversion 
of the thinking faculties ; at which times they seem to 
themselves to hold confidential interviews, to make 
voyages to remote countries, to live and act in strange 
scenes, and to perform remarkable mental feats, quite 
at variance with their every-day thoughts and volun- 
tary inclinations. 

The only rational explanation is to be found in the 
peculiar constitution and processes of such minds ; it 
is all attributable to an overmastering proneness of the 
faculties in such persons to act and play lawlessly upon 



61 O, BACKWARD LOOKING SON OF TIME." 



and among themselves. Inward realities, to such self- 
entertaining and unregulated minds, are nothing but 
the evanescent memories of the shadows of events in 
their own self- conscious kingdom. 



PROPHETIC DREAMS. 159 

Prophecy, or rather the love of foreseeing events, 
or of having " a fortune told," is almost a passion with 
minds so constituted. And yet but little reliance can 
be placed upon the imaginary predictions of these 
periodical introversionists. It is, in fact, fortunate 
that, notwithstanding his two-fold life, with both sides 
open to both worlds, man can only properly and hap- 
pily enjoy the phenomena and current realities of but 
one world at a time. 

Nevertheless man's spiritual altitude is such — being 
externally related to the world of effects, and interiorly 
consociated most intimately with the universe of causes 
— he can, in certain exalted and superior moments, 
discern what is possible, even probable, yea, certain / 
were it not for the unfathomable ocean of ebbing and 
flowing contingencies which perpetually mingle with 
and modify the superficial manifestations of undeviat- 
ing principles. But for this limitation — this inability 
to foresee all the processes involved, this defective 
vision of all the shadows of changes possible in the line 
of the event which is coming so rapidly on the bosom 
of fixed laws — but for this, and it is a mighty impedi- 
ment between the human spirit and the exercise of 
omniscience, man could foretell and comprehend the 
occurrences of the future like one of the gods. " If I 
dream one way," said a learned doctor, " and you 
dream another way, which of them am I to follow ? 



160 JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 

Some are inclined to believe their own dreams. But 
few are inclined to believe the dreams of their neigh- 
bors. And so in the end every one will be found to 
take the way in which his whim, or his impulse, or his 
fancy leads him." 

In all cases of prophecy, yet known, there have 
been obvious mistakes as to time, or place, or manner, 
or accompanying events ; all which was owing to the 
lack of perception of all the many and various effects 
which incidentally cropped out of the ocean of causes 
and principles. Most exalted residents of the Sum- 
merland, like our own astronomers and mathemati- 
cians, cognize the causes and laws which will inevitably 
develop certain natural effects. 

What marvellous clearness of perception is de- 
manded ! What philosophical accuracy of judgment 
must be exercised ! 

But, alas ! how unspeakably difficult for any citizen 
of the skies to impress with accuracy the whole mind 
of any one person on earth. The unexpected and rude 
intervention of human acts, the sudden snapping of 
some one of the many intricate threads in the web-work 
of life, the unavoidable complications arising from the 
intercepting forces within the mind of the medium who 
might receive the impressions — think of all these inter- 
polations and uncontrollable interruptions incessantly 
occurring along the far-extending lines of prophecy, 



PROPHETIC DREAMS. 161 

and you will be convinced that it is excessively diffi- 
cult, although not absolutely impossible, for any one 
terrestrial mind to foretell with unfailing certainty 
every event which may happen in the career of a per- 
son or nation. 

Thus human nature is forever surprising itself, being 
limited at all times in the exercise of intellectual and 
spiritual endowments ; and thus humanity is forever 
progressing and unfolding " something new." George 
Washington did not discern the immense possibilities 
of the vast civilized America in which we live to-day ; 
neither did the profound Benjamin Franklin in any 
degree foresee the wonders of the electrical telegraph ; 
nor did any of the ancient prophets forecast the mar- 
vels of spiritual intercourse which crown the religious 
developments of these days ; because from each of 
them, as from each of lis, is wisely denied the om- 
niscient faculty of knowing the end from the begin- 
ning. 

11 




XL 



T 



False and True Worship. 

RUE worship is an involuntary act of the inmost 

affections. 

Will and the understanding can determine and 
regulate the act, but they cannot originate and inspire 
the feeling, which rises unbidden from the bosom 
toward the supreme attraction. 

False worship, on the other hand, is not necessarily 
hypocritical. It is false in the sense of being, instead 
of from the affections, a result of religious teachings ; 
in which the real feelings and the real sentiments of 
the worshipper may take no honest interest. 

Worship of the supreme Spirit of the Universe is 
possible only to those who feel, and are, therefore, 



TRUE AND FALSE WORSHIP. 163 

powerfully attracted toward the sacred essence of the 
infinite Love. Any feeling less profound, any attrac- 
tion less essential, is certain to worship a lesser God 
and in an inferior manner. And inasmuch as the 
masses, among the most enlightened, are inspired with 
no such spirituality of feeling, they will not rise supe- 
rior to religious materialism. 

Pagan monuments and other ethnological relics 
give evidence of mankind's childhood in religion. 
Jove fills with awe and adoration the heart of the 
young worshipper. The Druids, the Syrians, and the 
Persians worship sincerely, yet how antagonistically ! 
They did not, any more than do people about us called 
Christians, exemplify in practice that religion, pure 
and undefiled before God and the Father, which is : 
" To visit the widows and the fatherless in their afflic- 
tion, and to keep unspotted from the world." 

False worship in religion is an attractively artistic, 
as well as an exquisitely artful, exercise in fashionable 
avenue churches on the Sabbath. The foundation of 
religion is believed by many to be the " sacred vol- 
ume ; " by such minds the real works of God, the uni- 
verse and the starry skies, are overlooked as of little 
moment. In a little work published in New York, 
1869, entitled the a Worship of the Body, compiled 
from the Anglican Authorities, and adapted to use in 
the American Church,' 5 we find that both the artistic 



164 JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. ' ' 

and artful rules for worshipping are, in the most solemn 
language, as follows : 




OBJECT-WORSHIP IN AMERICA. 



66 If you should by any chance have to enter or 
leave Church, or to pass before the Altar after the 
Prayer of Consecration, then you should ' genuflect ' 
(i. e. 9 kneel upon one knee) in adoration of Him Who 
veiled His Godhead under the mean form of a little 
Infant when the wise men knelt and worshipped Him, 
and Who now veils both His Godhead and Manhood 
under the mean and common forms of bread and wine 
in the Sacrament of the Holy Eucharist. 

" In making your reverence let it be always towards 
the Altar (i. e., facing it). Your obeisance should be 
an inclination of the body, and not of the head only. 
If made as you pass the Altar (whether you are so do* 



TRUE AND FALSE WORSHIP. 165 

ing in the Chancel or Nave) pause a moment, face it, 
and bend in devout consciousness of the act. The 
first kule then is, whenever you enter a Church, bow 
towards the Altar on passing it, and also before enter- 
ing or on leaving your pew. Should the Blessed 
Sacrament be upon the Altar at the time, genuflect. 

" Should you during Service or at any other time 
have occasion to approach the Altar, make your reve- 
rence at the point you reach nearest to it, and before 
doing any other act for which you have so approached ; 
the act completed, again bow and retire." 

These empirical rules, for worshipping the Al- 
mighty acceptably, are obeyed in the Metropolis of 
America ; at the present moment, and as religiously, 
too, as not more formal nor more false rules are this 
hour obeyed in India, in China, or in Japan. Again, 
the same evangelical instruction-book says : 

" You should bow at the Name of Jesus whenever 
it occurs in the course of Divine Service, — whether you 
are kneeling, standing, or sitting, — in devout adoration 
of that Name, at which, as St. Paul says, c every knee 
shall bow, of things in Heaven, and things on Earth ; ' 
also at the first verse of each Gloria Patri, in wor- 
ship of the Holy Trinity to Whom glory is therein 
ascribed. . . . Unless prevented by ill-health or bodi- 
ly infirmity, you should be most careful to obey the 
Church's injunctions, as set forth in her rubrics, as to 



166 



JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 




A TEN-POWER GOP. 



kneeling, standing and the like. Kneeling is the ap- 
pointed attitude of prayer, stand- 
ing of praise, sitting of instruc- 
tion : therefore the Church di- 
rects us to kneel when praying 
to Almighty God, to stand when 
singing His praises, and to sit 
when listening to the lessons or 
sermon." 

In Pagan countries, or, 
more properly, in countries 
more pagan than ours, the 
religious ceremonials are 
outwardly more crude and, 
therefore, less intellectual ; 
but no one can with truth 
affirm that worship there 
is less sincere than in the 
popular institutions of our coun- 
try. In America there is an un- 
counted host engaged in wor- 
shipping both day and night the 
herein illustrated almighty trin- 
ity : Copper! Silver!! Gold!!! 
The final doom of the devo- 
tee of Mammon is nothing less 
than to die miserably with a gold-fever ! Or, which is 




everybody's god. 




A FRACTIONAL GOD. 



TRUE AND FALSE WORSHIP. 



167 



not less to be dreaded and avoided, lie may die with 
a softening of the brain ; accompa- 
nied with a hardening of the heart, 
preceded by breaking of the spir- 
itual ligaments, and the overthrow 
of all ties connecting his affec- 
tions with the Good, the True, and 
the Beautiful. 

Little children are most sincere 
in worshipping objects. They are 
true idolators. All mothers know 
this truth by heart. 




RICH MAN SICK WITH THE 
GOLD-FEVER. 




A SINCERE WORSHIPPER. 



Fold to thy heart thy child, 
darling mother ! Time will 
quickly enough change the 
manifestations of the young 
affections. Another law of the 
interior life, more imperative 
in its commandments upon the 
heart than the filial, will in after years influence your 
son to bow in adoration before another shrine. It is 
true, and beautiful as true, that a child's love for the 
parental source does not die ; but, at the right time, 
another love becomes more' active and influential. 
Being born with organic attractions, inheriting bone 
of your bone and blood of your blood, does not control 
character or determine destiny. It is true that the 



168 



JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 



mother's offerings of affection may live and act within 
the child's immortal spirit ; but it is likewise true that, 
in accordance with the Divine 
decree, the processes, refinements, 
conjugations, and prolifications 
of the universe must go un- 
changeably forward. Therefore, 
deeper and more controlling than 
any physiological tie, stronger 
than any inheritance of parentage 
or country, is that sovereign Con- 
jugal principle which attracts to- 
gether two human hearts, and 
weds and melts and moulds them 
into one — thus beautifully har- 
ISSSSS^SSSS ionizing exactly opposite sides 
of the universe, with dissimilari- 
ties and varieties too delicate for analysis and too 
impalpable for classification. 

In order to successfully propagate the Christian 
religion, the policy and Jesuitical trickery of being 
" all things to all men " is recommended for use by a 
popular minister, thus : u When the Lord sent out 
His apostles He gave them what was in modern lan- 
guage a charge, when sending them out as sheep in 
the midst of wolves — they were to be wise as serpents 
and harmless as doves. We might think that the Mas- 




TRUE AND FALSE WORSHIP. 169 

ter lived without prudence and tact, particularly in its 
use toward men. But from a human side the prudence 
of the Lord was remarkable. He left Jerusalem be- 




A DEER-KEEPER WORSHIPPING A DEAR. 



cause He knew the Pharisees would kill Him, and 
stayed away until the prophecy was to be fulfilled ; 
but He had foresight and nice judgment of men, and it 
is shown by His charge to the disciples. In ancient 
times the serpent was the emblem of sagacity and wis- 
dom, and in that way it was used by Christ. They 
were to be shrewdly, closely wise ; to think, judge, 
and administer the truth ; they were not at liberty 
only to speak the truth, but to be circumspect at times, 
even to be silent, or to tell only a part of the truth. 
Men might have an impression that this was worldly 



170 



JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 



polity, but it does not change the fact that it is the 
duty of a man to employ all his foresight in the cause 
of Christ, and adapt himself to circumstances. But 
no man may use the weaknesses of his neighbor for his 
own selfish good ; but if you can use them to make 
him better, more virtuous, or more Christian, do it. 
The true way is to he all things to all men, if by so 
doing some may be saved. A Christian is clipper-built 
and glides along smoothly, but the blusterer has broad 
bows and makes a great fuss in the waters. To the 
Jews Paul was a Jew, to the Gentiles he was a Gen- 
tile. Kampant frankness had no discrimination and 
did no good, but the men who did the church most 




ORIGIN OP THE ART OF BEING " ALL THINGS TO ALL MEN.* 1 

service as administrators and organizers have been wise 
as serpents. But they must be also harmless as doves, 
and make that impression upon outside men." 



TRUE AXD FALSE WORSHIP. 171 

Such language, notwithstanding its evident sin- 
cerity, is the language of one who prays for the success 
of a particular creed or system of religion. Not such 
policy deterred n.or governed the good Channing. He 
said : u The very religion which was adapted to exalt 
human nature, has been used to make it abject. The 
very religion which was ^iven to create a generous 
hope, has been made an instrument of servile and tor- 
turing fear. The very religion which came from God's 
goodness to enlarge the soul with a kindred goodness, 
has been employed to narrow it to a sect, to rear the 
Inquisition, and to kindle fires for the martyr. The 
very religion given to make the understanding and 
conscience free, has, by a criminal proversion, sent to 
break them into subjection to priests, ministers, and 
human creeds. Ambition and craft have seized on the 
solemn doctrines of an omnipotent God, and of future 
punishment, and turned them into engines against the 
child, the trembling female, the ignorant adult, until 
the skeptic has been emboldened to charge on religion, 
the chief miseries and degradation of human nature." 

The first minister quoted, said : " If you can use 
the weaknesses of the neighbor to make him more 
Christian, do it." On the other hand, the second min- 
ister boldly denounces " wise as serpents " doctrine, 
with its correlation of " all things to all men," as a 
criminal attempt to " subject man to priests and hu- 



172 JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 

man creeds." With clearer and worthier vision a wise, 
womanly writer said : " Religion is the true, the only 
reformatory power. She sometimes wears one gar- 
ment, sometimes another — the crown of art, the veil 
of philosophy, the hard and shining armor of the law. 
All of these by turns disguise her, and when these 
various forms effect any thing, we find that religion 
was at the bottom of what was done. Our applications 
of religion are often defective, often at fault. Men 
build stone cathedrals in place of living temples, and 
invent stony creeds in place of discovering vital doc- 
trines. In view of this I would repeat one of the 
prayers familiar to my youth. I was taught long be- 
fore I knew any thing of spiritual or other anatomy, 
to pray that God would take away my heart of stone 
and give me a heart of flesh. So now I will pray that 
God would take away our church of stone and give us 
a church of flesh, with the living blood of the body 
politic circulating through it." 

Throughout Christendom, especially in Catholic 
countries, " the cross " is reverently regarded by au- 
thority. By many religionists it is well-nigh wor- 
shipped. "Within the sacred temples of monastic days, 
as well as w r ithin the groves and along the rivers of 
the classic lands, the crucifix is lifted and kissed as the 
symbol of an infinite God's own personal sufferings 
and tragical local sacrifices for the inhabitants of this 



TRUE AND FALSE WORSHIP. 



1T3 



* Ji 



little seventh-rate globe. " The custom of making the 
Sign of the Cross," says the authority quoted, " is as 
old as Christianity it- 
self, and is mentioned 
by the earliest writers. 
It is done by touching 
first the forehead and 
then the breast with 
the fingers of the right 
hand, and then in a 
similar way making a 
line across the breast 
from left to right. You 
should at least practice 
this venerable custom 
before and after engag- 
ing in public and pri- 
vate prayer, at the 
same time invoking 
the Holy Trinity, say- 
ing ' In the name of the Father ' as you touch the 
forehead, because the Father is head of all things ; 
' and of the Son ' as you touch your breast, because 
the Son was begotten of the father ; ' and of the Holy 
Ghost ' as you draw the line from left to right across 
the breast, because the Holy Ghost is co-equal with 
the Father and the Son. Thus the Sign of the Cross 




THE CHRISTIAN'S EMBLEM. 



174 JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 

is not only a token that you begin and end your ser- 
vice trusting in the merits of your crucified Lord, but 
it is also a beautiful symbol of your faith in l" 
the Blessed Trinity." 



In the sight of other eyes, from which §1 
look minds and hearts belonging to the pro 




PICTURE OP 
AN IDOL. 



gressive school of faith and works, " the 
Cross " is nothing more than a relic of an ancient semi- 
civilized method of publicly and ignominiously execut- 
ing persons convicted of capital crimes. " During the 
middle ages," says a candid writer, " a famous instru- 
ment of death, called the Maiden, was in use. It was 
the figure of a beautiful virgin placed in the niche of a 
prison-cell to represent the adorable Madonna. The 
prisoner, exhausted by fasting and torture, and turned 
into this cell, falls in supplication before this image, 
which is contrived to open its arms, as if to invite his 
bewildered fancy to a protecting embrace. He rushes 
into the trap ; the arms close, and a thousand knife- 
blades kiss his life away. Such is the religion of every 
kind of oppression." 

With this diabolical virgin-punishment w r e are, by 
the imperative promptings of both truth and humanity, 
compelled to classify every ancient and modern plan 
for inflicting suffering and mortification. Therefore 
the rack, the gibbet, the wheel, the guillotine, the gal- 
lows, and " the cross," we classify and impale together 



TRUE AND FALSE WORSHIP. 175 

as so many monstrous human inventions for overcom- 
ing and punishing evil with evil. Not one of these 
inventions merits the least exaltation ; for each alike is 
nothing but an emblem of man's ignorance, retaliation, 
and cruelty. The sign of the modern gallows, and not 
the sign of the ancient cross, should be made by every 
devout American. Harmonialists accept as worthy of 
perpetuation none of these old-time inventions ; and 
yet, as F. L. H. Willis, in a moment of inspiration, 
said — 

u We can look on scenes of glory 

That no artist can reveal ; 
Though no saints are in our niches, 

Carved from blocks of faultless stone, 
Yet we know that saints are with us 

Helping all our labors on. 
All the pomp, and pride, and fashion, 

Priests once gave to church and fane ; 
But we give to saints immortal 

Wealth that loving hearts contain. 
They once thought to enter heaven 

By the wafer and the wine, 
But we seek the living water, 

And we ask for bread divine. 
Holy spirits ! ye who usher 

In the day of truth and love, 
Bring us gifts from off the altars 

Of your own blest spheres above. 
Then we'll feel the fire of heaven 

Kindling in our waiting hearts, 



176 JETS OF NEW MEANINGS 

And we'll know our God is with us 

By the life its warmth imparts ; 
And as true and loving brothers 

We will wage a noble strife — 
Daily met in one great temple 

Of a true harmonious life, 
'Mid whose high and fretted arches 

We may hear the angels sing, 
To whose fair and unstained altars 

We may every purpose bring. 
Thus the temple shall be builded, 

Reaching to the heavens above : 
Consecrate to God the Father, 

Because built of human love." 



Impressed with the beauty and mystery of the 
Wheel, the ancients erected it into an object of wor- 
ship. Ethnological researches, bringing to light the 
devices and designs of diverse kinds of art, architect- 
ure, and religion, disclose the most popular forms and 
objects of primeval worship. Wheel- worshippers be- 
gan with the figure of the Circle; and the serpent, 
with its imagined death-dealing, healing, and life-giv- 
ing qualities, was the accepted symbol. The prophet 
Ezekiel frequently refers to the wheel, with indefinite 
intimations of its profound mysteries. For myself, 
since perceiving the eternal elements enfolded by the 
ellipse as a mathematical figure, I could bow to " the 
circle " as reverently and as sincerely as Christians 



TRUE AND FALSE WORSHIP. 177 

uncover before " the cross," making its sign with a 
prayer for recognition and protection. The pre-empted 
proprietors of the " Garden of Eden " unjustly claim 
to have originated the Wheel-and-Serpent religion. 
Whether Adam introduced the Tree-warship and Eve 
the Serpent-worship >, or the reverse, is as yet unhap- 
pily an open question. The truth is that, except the 
empire of China, the serpent-wheel religion has had 
devotees in all parts of the world. Until the reign of 
Hezekiah, the image of the serpent was worshipped by 
certain tribes of Jews, during more than six hundred 
years ; because they, in common with many sects of 
Asia and the East, supposed the serpent to be in some 
mysterious manner a representation of both the crea- 
tive and the destroying deities. Of course, the most 
ignorant believers worshipped the Serpent itself, instead 
of the particular deity which it was originally designed 
to conspicuously represent ; just as, in our more en- 
lightened day, the most ignorant among Christians 
revere and worship the cross, the church, the Bible, 
and other images, instead of the life that led to the 
Martyrdom, the Truth, the Spirit, and Nature, which 
are the only real realities worthy of all adoration and 
obedience. 

Sincere and true worship may be outward and ob- 
jective, or interior and subjective ; but invariably the 

act is in accordance with the real moral and intellect- 
12 



178 



JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 




THE IDOL OP MANY. 



ual growth of the worshipper. False worship, on the 
other hand, is in accordance with the individual's 
religious instructions, social temptations, and govern- 
ing circumstances. The kind-hearted lover of the 
noble horse is sincerely filled with admiration (possibly 
with emotions amounting to adora- 
tion), for the majestic and full-blood- 
ed beauty. While the purely intel- 
lectualist, the man devoted to the won- 
ders of antiquity, of research in sci- 
ence, glorying over and feasting upon 
the great wealth of literature — such a 
man is a devotee at the shrine of Ge- 
nius — and hooks, instead of running 
brooks, are his supreme and all-ab- 
sorbing attraction. 

A distinguished writer once dared 
to express in verse the thoughts and 
meditations of every rational observer. 
In a style of unaffected simplicity, which is only 
equalled by the plainness of his speech, he wrote : 

I stood at the door of God's temple one day, 

And gazed at the throng as they entered : 
I studied each face, as they passed up the aisle, 

To find out on what their thoughts centred. 




BIBLIOLATRY. 



And I judged, from the lookB that the most of them wore, 
And the glances they cast at their dresses, 



TRUE AND FALSE WORSHIP. 179 

That they worshipped, instead of their Father above, 
The diamonds they wore in their tresses. 

And I thought, as I stood looking silently on 

Until all the throng had been seated, 
If this is the way they worship their God, 

I am sure He is very ill-treated. 

Then I turned me away, my soul's feelings to hide, 

And wandered to where, in the wildwood, 
I could hear the birds sing their joyful songs, 

As sweet as in days of my childhood. 

And I seated myself by the side of a brook, 

On a time-worn and moss-covered stone ; 
And I said to myself, with a sigh of relief, 

" I will worship my God here alone. 

"And the sweet birds that sing in the tops of the trees 

Shall waft to the throne songs of love, 
While my heart shall go out, in its fulness, to Him 

Who reigneth in mercv above." 




XII. 



Origin and Influence of Prayer. 

TRUE prayer, oral or silent, is born of the bosom, 
not of the brain. It is the legitimate child of emo- 
tion, undisturbed by skeptical suggestions of the intel- 
lect. Hence as a purely spiritual exercise, springing 
from the love-gravitation of the finite toward the 
attraction of the Infinite, prayer is likely to include a 
great variety of conflicting elements ; among which 
may be mentioned — fervency, rapture, inconsistency, 
selfishness, mystery, shallowness, awe, reverence, ego- 
ism, conceit^ fear, worship, confidence, rest, and joy. 



INFLUENCE OF PRAYER. 181 

Spirit is the source of the emotion which seeks to 
utter itself in prayer. Closet prayers are petitions for 
benefits, or expressions of gratitude, or praise, or sub- 
mission, too deep for words, whispered to the Infinite 
from the divine silence of the sincere spirit. 

The earnest and sincere nature is invariably devout 
and prayerful. Devotion is the allegiance and bestow- 
nient of mind to its labors, objects, and enterprises. 
A mind, sincere and earnest, but not intelligent, prays 
to the gods for special favors. The God conceived by 
such a mind is not unchangeable. He thinks, or rather 
he unthinkingly believes, that praying " without ceas- 
ing," or that human entreaties uttered in profound 
faith, may attract God's attention, overcome His ori- 
ginal reluctance to granting personal favors, and may 
possibly induce Him, " just for this once," to modify 
or suspend the operation of natural laws and causes. 

A mind capable of such a conception is happily 
incapable of perceiving the detrimental blasphemy 
involved. Nor does such a mind realize the equal 
sincerity and earnestness of every other devotee at- 
tached to the conflicting forms of religion in other 
parts of the globe. From hundreds of minarets, 
throughout the vast empire of the Sultan, at this very 
hour, the faithful are forwarding sincerest petitions to 
God — asking that infidelity (by which they mean 
Christianity) be destroyed, that Mahomet be univers- 



182 



JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 



ally accepted as prophet, and the Koran received by 
mankind as the only infallible rule of faith and prac- 
tice. With no more sincerity the faithful in the dif- 
ferent Christian 
churches, beginning 
with the head of 
the papal system 
and ending with the 
youngest exhorter in 
a camp-meeting, are 
praying for favors 
and results entirely 
antagonistic. War- 
riors pray to the 
God of Battle; 
p eace-makers peti- 
tion a God of Love. 
Beading with Chris- 
tian eyes, and pray- 
ing with the emotions familiar to the catechismally- 
educated Christian heart, pass for nothing in thoSe 
immense regions where, for twelve hundred years, the 
Mohammedans have sincerely prayed to Allah, which 
Is only another name for " God." On the other hand, 
in countries over which the religion of the Jews and 
converted Gentiles prevails, under the general term of 
Christianity, the reading and devout praying of the 




READING WITH CHRISTIAN EYES. 



INFLUENCE OF PRAYER. 



183 



followers of Buddha, Brahma, or Mahomet, pass for 
nothing. And yet all praying is essentially the same, 
differing in expression only as there is difference in the 
birth, temperament, and education of the individual. 
A child-state of mind is essential to fervent and 
rapturous prayer. Every thing wonderful is possible 
in the ignorant mind. The absolute impartiality of 
God, and the irreversible and eternal unchangeableness 
of Nature's laws, are ideas impossible to be understood 
by partial and fickle persons. In the beginning man 
made God in his own image and likeness ; and unto 
this primal masterpiece man has ever since addressed 
his childlike prayers. It is related that a little boy of 
Provincetown, four 
years old, very anxious 
for a drum, the eve- 
ning preceding Christ 
mas Eve, on going to 
bed, uttered the fol- 
lowing earnest prayer : 
" Now I lay me down 
to sleep," / want a 
drum, " I pray the 
Lord/' / want a drum, 
" my soul to keep ; if 

I should die before I wake," / want a drum. And 
his prayer was answered ! 




PRAYER OP THE BEGGAR-GIRL. 



184 



JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 



The universal practice is to pray upon the theory 
that the Infinite expects and requires of finite creatures 
vocal recognition, glorification, and entreaty. This 
fallacious theory has resulted in universal routine 
praying — a sort of Sabbath-drill and periodical drive 
at the original source of every blessing — so that the 
phraseology of prayer, as well as the peculiar emotions 
volitionally summoned to stimulate vocal utterance, 
have become wearily monotonous and blasphemously 



V jfea 




PRAYER BY MAN TO MAN IN POWBR. 



mechanical. As a labor-saving expedient, the more 
logical, yet not less sincere, heathen have instituted 
divers praying-machines ; which, it is affirmed, uni- 
formly maintain an untarnished reputation for " good 
morals," and demand nothing by way of salary for 
religious " services rendered." 

Enthroned human power, which means influence 



INFLUENCE OF PRAYER. 185 

embodied in place or genius, commands respect and 
compels worship. " Hero-worship," is the homage paid 
by awe-struck and submissive idolators to the personi- 
fication of power. The prone spirit of prayer is pre- 
sent in all such adoration. It is this spirit of syco- 
phantic subserviency which urges men to surrender 
their natural rights, and to sign : " We are your Lord- 
ship's humble and obedient servants." Obedience to 
constituted authority is necessary to private and public 
order. With such obedience is mingled the element 
of conscience or duty. But it is manifestly every 
man's higher duty, all his life long, to search out and 
obey the Truth. " His Worshipful Highness," is the 
utterance of a devotee. The primal impulse is the 
same, only directed with different thoughts, when the 
tongue substitutes the words — " O thou, Lord God 
Almighty." 

An ardent, poetic temperament, stimulating a mind 
much more developed in the moral faculties than in 
the intellectual, is most successful in expressing the 
beauty of holiness in prayer. Only religious poets, 
during their youthful epochs, can reach the climax of 
inspiration in utterance. 

True prayer is the glowing and graceful expression 
of the virgin imagination, warmed and fed by spiritual 
passion and devout meditation. Religious feeling is 
the poetic brooding of the spirit. It is cherished most 



186 JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 

devotionally in youth. And being an intimation of 
that infinite and eternal life of which the spirit is mys- 
teriously a part, the feeling grows in the most inmost 
secrets of the heart, and is revealed often in the pas- 
sionate and picturesque language of prayer. Analysis 
of the development and formation of the religious 
character would reveal elements which are indispensa- 
ble to a true poetic genius — such as childhood, with its 
apprehensive and clinging consciousness of depen- 
dence ; love of solitude, with its unconquerable melan- 
choly and brooding ; love of the supernatural, with 
its delicate imaginations and bold appreciations of the 
Supreme Power ; love of ideas, with its conflicting 
consciousness of ignorance and intuition strangely inter- 
mingled ; and, lastly, the love of life, with its moods 
and mysteries, with its loneliness and associations, with 
faith and doubts, attempts, failures, reveries, sorrows, 
and despair — these elements, in states more or less act- 
ive, are to be found in the composition of the sincerely 
religious character, especially during the earlier years 
of its development. 

Finite good within yearns toward the Infinite good. 
The spirit's natural impulse is to enlist in God's 
service ; and prayer is the formal act of enrollment. 
The ambition to be an officer, and not a private, in the 
Lord's army, is deemed a holy ambition. The protec- 
tion of the Almighty is a feeling with which eternal 



INFLUENCE OF PRAYER. 187 

love and assistant angels clothe every human heart 
that truly pours itself out in prayer. 

A young and recently consecrated clergyman is 
most enthusiastic in feeling ; and he is on most familiar 
and affectionate terms with God. His feeling of 
" power from Heaven " is equal, in his own estima- 
tion, to the might of ten times ten thousand sinners. 
He fights valiantly under the war-standard of the 
Almighty. It is, perhaps, a great happiness that he 
is not disturbed with the fact that thousands of persons 
— his equals in position, ability, industry, and sincer- 
ity — have entered God's service through fervent and 
constant prayer, uttered before altars in pagodas and 
in countries where the Christian's bible and plans of 
salvation have never been heard of. Was is not some- 
what youthful to write in the following style ? " In 
your lonely prayers are the springs of all prayerful 
influence. What mighty heroes have sprung from 
that closet-communion ! O, those wells that gushed 
in God's sight only ! That outcry in secret to God ! 
What great life has come from private prayer ! Chris- 
tianity was born in Gethsemane. Cromwell's soldiers, 
beneath their iron armor, wore priyate prayer, and 
that is the reason they whipped the dashing cavaliers. 
.The old Covenanters tore their knees upon the rocks 
in wrestlings with themselves, and then went to mar- 
tyrdom as to a feast. We owe it to the Puritan pri- 



188 JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 

vate prayer that we have this Republic today. Not 
to talents alone, not to genius, not to tact, is the world 
in debt ; but to the prone soul in the shut chamber. 
O, when you hear the tramp of armies, do you think 
they win the day ? No ! but God's step in the soul's 
communion." 

There is doubtless a certain correspondence between 
a man's life and his prayers ; not because of his pray- 
ers, but because of the mental and moral condition 
out of which his petitions are spoken. A wicked- 
minded man is insane. He is ungrateful and turbu- 
lent ; like the tempest, he is full of discords and de- 
struction. He is no poet, and his whole life is covered 
with the clouds of calamities ; his ship is tossed in the 
waves of woes and passion ; so that, unless he selfishly 
supplicates for help, he is a stranger to every kind of 
prayer. 

Religious persons, on the contrary, believe that 
every day, like every great labor, should begin and 
end with prayer. This systematic plan, under God's 
blessing, it is believed will make the day and the labor 
prosperous. But all experience proves that obedience 
to the laws of truth and justice is attended with far 
greater happiness and prosperity. The history of the 
American nation, like the career of every other people, 
indicates that divine principles, when obeyed, and not 
prayers uttered either by priests or citizens, accom- 



INFLUENCE OF PRAYER. 189 

plished all the real prosperity it ever enjoyed. Our 
Congress lias a chaplain. " I heard him pray this 
morning," writes a correspondent to the Independent. 
u I haven't a doubt but he intended to offer it to the 
Lord, that loud-rolling, oratorical prayer ; but it sound- 
ed very much as if it were addressed to the senators. 
Half the public prayers we hear seem to bound back 
from the ceiling. I wonder how they seem to the 
Lord, these astonishing literary performances made at 
His feet, in which he receives much curious informa- 
tion concerning His universe and the way to manage 
it ! I know I am not a standard in such matters. I 
couldn't throw out my arms, throw back my head, and 
lift up my voice in rolling thunder to the Almighty, 
if I would ; and I would not, if I could. Therefore, 
I'm no criterion while I say that if every senator 
bowed his uncovered head in silent supplication it 
would be much more impressive as an act of worship 
than all the rhetoric which ever rolled heavenward 
from the desk." 

u Would'st thou know the lawfulness of the labor 
which thou desirest to undertake ? " asked Enchiridon. 
u Let thy devotion recommend it to divine blessing ; 
if it be lawful, thou shalt perceive thy heart encour- 
aged by thy prayer ; if unlawful, thou shalt find thy 
prayer discouraged by thy heart." That is to say, a 
man must first desire to do good, and his exertions 



190 



JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 



must correspond with his desire, before he can realize 
much strength and comfort from prayer. Such pray- 
ers are simply right actions. The firmest will and the 
toughest muscles give out eventually in a bad cause ; 
while in the cause of truth, love, justice, and peace, 
success is certain at last to crown the weakest and 
humblest laborer. Who would attempt to pray for a 
harvest without having first plowed and planted the 
ground ? Prayer is a healer of diseases ; only when 
faith is sufficient to stimulate the will-power, whereby 




PRATERS WHICH ANSWER THEMSELVES. 



crippled functions are aroused to new life. Prayer 
feeds the poor, only when some attending angels bring 
aid from the rich ; but this is an end not easily or fre- 
quently accomplished. Labor, righteously and per- 
sistently bestowed, is the surest self-answering prayer, 



INFLUENCE OF PRAYER. 



191 




and it never comes without the blessings and sweet 
benedictions of God and Nature. 

It is mental infancy which believes in a fickle and 
wrathful God. Believers in supernatural warnings, 
and in sudden strokes from the throne of omnipotence, 
are ignorant of the laws of 
reason and science. A clap 
of thunder, which is utterly 
without power to harm, is 
more alarming to the igno- 
rant than the flash of light- 
ning which alone can de- 
stroy. So with all ideas 
among the superstitious con- 
cerning the efficacy and 
mystery of prayer. They think that a roaring Metho- 
distic petition, let off at the top of the voice, will 
quicker attract God's attention than the unspoken 
" good wish" which, like the " God bless you " of an 
angel's whispered prayer, throbs and burns before high 
heaven, noiselessly, in the sweet sanctuary of the sin- 
cere heart. 

Attributing horrible deeds to God's direct agency 
belongs legitimately to the era of oral and noisy pray- 
ing. In Richmond, Va., within a few months, there 
occurred a terrible scene ; about which one of " the 
great dailies " thus most wisely discourses : " It is a 



MEN SAVING THEMSELVES. 



192 • JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 

weakness of clergymen to attribute to providential 
agency, as either directly or indirectly manifested, the 
most horrible of deeds. In this particular case we find 
the Rev. Mr. Hepworth gravely asserting that ' there 
was a God in it ; it was no blind accident.' Rev. Mr. 
Smyth, discoursing on the same subject, held that 
homes were made desolate and hearts cruelly wrung 
because of political injustice, which was true enough ; 
but he followed up these ideas by indirectly express- 
ing the conviction that the accident was due to a 
special visitation of Providence. In Washington, the 
Rev. Mr. Barry, after declaring that ' God moved in 
a mysterious way,' applied this quotation from the 
hymn to the disaster, by saying that ' the Richmond 
catastrophe and similar calamities only illustrate the 
fact of God's providence. Such things are not the 
work of chance.' We could quote from several other 
sermons to show that all the preachers were of one 
mind ; but these will suffice for our purpose. 

" Now, with all due respect to the clergymen, we 
must differ with them in their conclusions. The Rich- 
mond accident was due to purely natural causes, or 
rather to the disobedience of laws laid down by nature. 
We cannot see wherein the Lord had any thing to 
do with the giving way of the floor. Ignorant archi- 
tects, and not Providence, are responsible for the kill- 
ing and maiming of nearly two hundred persons. 



INFLUENCE OF PRATER. 193 

There was not, and is not, the slightest evidence of 
the supernatural having been concerned in the disas- 
ter. Certain pillars which had supported the floor 
had been injudiciously removed, thereby weakening 
the power of the beam to support a heavy weight. 
For the first time, probably, since the alterations were 
made the court room was densely crowded. As a nat- 
ural consequence the laws of gravitation asserted them- 
selves ; the girder gave way, and the mass of human 
beings was precipitated to the floor beneath to meet 
death or wounds. Here we have a clear, simple ex- 
planation of the affair. Nowhere in it can we see the 
hand of Providence. Nothing occurred which cannot 
be accounted for on purely natural grounds. 

" If we are to agree with the preachers that the 
Almighty deliberately cut off from earth some sixty 
persons, mangled the bodies of more than one hundred 
others, brought misery and penury to many domestic 
circles and plunged an entire community in mourning, 
why shall we not hold Him responsible for the com- 
mission of every frightful act ? Shall we hold that 
when one man murders another the hand of Provi- 
dence is apparent in the deed ? Are all the horrible 
and nameless crimes almost daily committed the work 
of God? If they are, then nothing is left for Satan to 
do. Certainly, when we reflect that the victims of the 

Richmond disaster were not more sinful than the ma- 
13 



194 JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 

jority of men, it seems very much as if the King of 
Evil had more to do with it than the God of mercy 
and righteousness. One's faith in the divine truths 
of Christianity would be much shaken if the belief 
could find lodgment in the mind that to the direct 
agency of Providence is due all, or a great part, of 
human woe and misery. JSTo ; mysterious as are God's 
ways, they do not manifest themselves in such horrors 
as that which occurred at Richmond last week, The 
Infinite mind seeks not thus to impress its power upon 
sinful humanity, and we must, therefore, dissent from 
the views of those clergymen who argue that it does. 
And more ; in leaving this subject we must give ex- 
pression to the profound conviction that one of the 
great reasons for the wide-spread scepticism of the age 
is to be found in clergymen preaching from the pulpit 
the doctrine of providential agency in the most repul- 
sive occurrences. By this teaching Christianity is 
divested of its most beautiful features, and God Him- 
self is represented as the very incarnation of cruelty 
and revenge." 

So much wholesome common sense, uttered so free- 
ly by the editor of a leading journal, in the Metropolis 
of America, is enough to induce the Governors to ap- 
point a " Day for Fasting, Humiliation, and Prayer." 

It is no mystery why infantile and sincere minds — 
that is, religious-minded persons, totally ignorant of 



INFLUENCE OF PRAYER. 195 

the teachings of modern science — should be terrified 
by great material changes. (We do not now speak of 
pulpit charlatans and professional hypocrites.) Nine 
out of every ten of such minds believe devoutly that 
the earthquake and the thunder-storm are really God's 
chosen chariots in which to drive furiously and roar- 
ingly about among His insignificant creatures. They 
think that nothing but noise and fire and fury — like 
volcanic thunders, lightnings, and ocean tempests — 
can give adequate expression to the unfathomable 
opinions and feelings of omnipotence ! Persons of 
this way of believing are usually gifted in vociferating 
tremendous prayers into the immense ears of their 
changeful and wrathful god. 

There really is, however, an impressiveness in thun- 
der and lightning, and in falling floods of rain, which 
cannot but fill the mind with wonder and awe ; and 
it was but natural that, before men could comprehend 
the phenomena of nature through science, the ignorant 
worshipper was overwhelmed with unspeakable fear 
and trembling. 

In, Ludlow's recent work, entitled " The Heart of 
the Continent," we find the following grand description 
of a thunderstorm on the great Western Plains ; by 
which the religious imagination is distinctly impressed 
with the terrible grandeur of the scene : " The agency 
that wrought those delicate traceries of golden sprig 



196 JETS OF NEW MEANINGS, 

and anastomosing vein-work began to have a voice. 
At the foot of the great stair came a rumbling and a 
groan, as if the giants were beginning to climb. It 
grew louder, and here and there step parted from step, 
then the structure lifted at the base and descended at 
the top, making a series of black blocks and boulders, 
hanging downward from the same level of sky with 
lurid interstices between them, through which the up- 
ward depths looked awful. Never in my life did I see 
cloud distances graded with such delicacy. One could 
almost measure them by miles from the inky surface, 
hanging with torn fringes of leaden vapor just above 
our head, up through the tremendous chasms flecked 
along their wall, with dying gold and purple color, 
with wonderful light and shadows, and marked by in- 
numerable changes of contour, to the clear but angry 
sky that paved the farthest depth of the abysses. (I 
rode on the box for an hour looking into these glorious 
rifts with fascinated eyes.) Then between their wails 
began a hnrrying interplay of lightning, and the great 
artillery combat of the heavens commenced in earnest. 
At first the adjoining masses had their duels to them- 
selves, battery fighting battery, pair and pair. Half 
an hour more and the forces had perceptibly massed, 
their fire coming in broader sheet, their thunder bel- 
lowing louder. An hour, and the fight of the giants 
became a general engagement. The whole hemisphere 



INFLUENCE OF PRAYER. 197 

was a blinding mass of yellow flauie at once, and the 
reports were each one an instantaneous shock, which 
burst the air like the explosion, of a mine. Then the 
wind rose to a hurricane ; and before the dust could 
be set whirling by it, there followed such a flood of 
rain as I never saw anywhere, on sea or land. Sitting 
on the box still, for I bad much rather be soaked than 
desert such a spectacle, I found my breath taken away 
for the first minute, as if I had been under a waterfall. 
It was not drops, nor jets, nor a sheet ; it was a mass 
of coherent water falling down bodily. Five minutes 
from the time it began to wet us, the horses were run- 
ning fetlock-deep, with the road still hard under their 
hoofs, for the soil had not yet had time to dissolve into 
mud. Torrents were flowing down every incline ; 
where the plain basined, the water stood in broad 
sheets revealed by the flashes like new ponds suddenly 
added to the scenery. Still the storm did not spend 
itself in wind and water. The lightning got broader, 
and its flashes quicker in succession ; the thunder sur- 
passed every thing I have heard, or read, or dreamed 
of. Between explosions we were so stunned that we 
could scarcely speak to or hear each other, and the 
shocks themselves made us fear for the permanent loss 
of our hearing. One moment we were in utter dark- 
ness, our horses kept in the road only by the sense of 
feeling ; the next, and the vast expanse of rain-tram- 



198 JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 

pled grass lay in one embrace of topaz fire, with the 
colossal piles of clefted cloud out of which the deluge 
was coming, earth and heaven illumined with a bright- 
ness surpassing the most cloudless noon." 

In contemplating such a storm, with all its atten- 
dant phenomena, the mind is involuntarily made to 
think of the immeasurable energies of Omnipotence. 
Great mountains, seen by impressible eyes, produce the 
same internal effects. Thus people grow like the 
scenery and character of the country they for centuries 
inhabit. Oriental life is a reflex of Oriental scenery. 
Hebrew history embodies the physical facts and cli- 
matic phenomena of the great East. The sumptuous 
pomp, the barbaric magnificence, the (so to speak) 
supernatural vicissitudes, the picturesque superstitions, 
the wars, successes, revolutions, and the religious mani- 
festations of the ancient Oriental nations, have counter- 
parts in the great deserts, fertile plains, beautiful val- 
leys, mighty mountain ranges, unsurpassed rivers, and 
vast seas of that most wonderful continent. 

Therefore, if you would understand the origin of 
a oral prayer," you must look into the spiritual ima- 
ginations of the Hebrew and other Oriental nations. 
Day after day, night after night, until forty suns were 
gone, Moses dwelt alone upon the mountain. The 
dread shadow of the Eternal throne impressed the 
religious poet and lawgiver. He was praying for the 



INFLUENCE OF PRAYER. 199 

good of the multitudes in the valleys below. The good- 
will of God was solicited day after day by the inter- 
cessor in his vocal prayers. He sought to change the 
purposes of the Unchangeable ! He sought to alter the 
inflexible will of Jehovah. Thunders roared and light- 
nings played fearfully upon the mountain. The dis- 
cordant hosts of the vale witnessed the terrors of the 
Almighty. Yet they were deplorably ignorant and 
superstitious. They instituted other more palpable 
means than prayers for obtaining God's favorable no- 
tice and protection. But the power of the great leader 
was commensurate with his untiring persistency in oral 
prayer. Accordingly on returning from the mountain 
to his brethren, he instituted the government and wor- 
ship of the King of kings ; and his inflexible will, act- 
ing like God's voice upon the weak and idol-building 
hosts, filled them with reverence and unquestioning 
obedience. 

From all which we gather a lesson : that the most 
sincere and uncompromising love of truth, the strongest 
will, combined with the clearest practical wisdom, 
burning with fervent religious feeling, and exemplified 
by unweariable industry, are infallibly certain to win. 

But, O friendly reader ! let us not leave this theme 
without considering some of its correlations and help- 
ful auxiliaries. The following chapter should be read 
as " the same subject continued." 




3^r " *5^s^" 



XIII. 



Realms of Sorrow and Superstition. 



THAT superstition is hurtful which attributes horri- 
ble deeds to the direct agency of an angry personal 
God. 

It is at the bottom, because it is the stem-supersti- 
tion, of that kind of " religious duty " which, swayed 
by an educational conscience, imposes upon its posses- 
sor the solemn necessity of oral prayers and formal 
supplications. The originators of this theory say that 
God's anger must be placated, His good-will must be 
obtained, and direct acts and benefactions by Him in 
your favor, must be secured ; and the " means " most 



SORROW AND SUPERSTITION. 201 

certain, according to sectarian superstitions, are faith 
and works, but above and surest of all, are frequent 
and long-continued prayers, " put up " with all your 
soul and might and mind, wrestling with God not to 
be omitted, accompanied by any form of entreaty ima- 
ginable. It was said of a certain eloquent preacher 
that, after the fine choir sung a few hymns, u the doc- 
tor delivered a nice essay in the vocative as a prayer, 
and then took the text from which to preach." Such 
gifted prayers — " nice essays " — are more abundant 
than beneficial. 

This superstition sometimes takes on another form ; 
of which the following is an illustration : " A religious 
woman who always kept Sunday and washed o' Mon- 
day, and in fact all the rest of the week, as she was a 
washerwoman by occupation, had managed to scrape 
up money enough to build a snug little house and barn 
in the country, and one afternoon, after she was com- 
fortably settled, there came along a terrible tornado 
which tore her barn to pieces and smashed part of the 
house. The old lady's indignation was at first un- 
speakable, but at last she sobbed, u Well, here's a 
pretty piece of business. No matter, though ; I'll pay 
for this — I'll w T ash on Sundays." The world's mourn- 
ful graveyards, in which all are sooner or later mus- 
tered from life's battle-fields, are the realms of numer- 
ous sweet superstitions. Of the many beautiful or 



202 JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 

otherwise, I will here mention but two : One, that 
death is a perpetual sleep in the grave ; the other 
(which contains a sublime truth), that the gates of 
heaven open so broadly that the hosts are perpetually 
marching in and out, from earth to heaven and from 
heaven to earth, subject to solicitations of terrestrial 
high privates, who congregate in " circles " or kneel 
together in "prayer." 

Of the superstition that " death is an eternal sleep " 
much might be written. It is the foundation of all ab- 
solute skepticism concerning the existence of a world 
beyond the grave. It argues that beyond known 
phenomena there is nothing different to discover. Our 
knowledge of mind and our knowledge of matter is 
asserted to be scientific and certain, only limited ; and 
that, so far as our real observation and knowledge of 
these conditions go, all is just as infallibly reliable as 
though it were extended through infinity and pro- 
longed through eternity. Coupled with this reasoning 
is the assertion that death is death, and not life ; that 
the idea of personal immortality is fallacious, being 
" an idea," and nothing more. Death, these reasoners 
say, is the certain end of all. Thus — 

" An immense solitary spectre waits ; 
It has no shape, it has no sound ; it has 
No place; it has no time ; it is and was 
And will be ; it is never more nor less, 



SORROW AND SUPERSTITION. 203 

Nor glad nor sad. Its name is Nothingness. 
Power walketh high ; and misery doth crawl 
And the clepsydra drips, and the sands fall 
Down in the hour-glass, and the shadows sweep 
Around the dial ; and men wake and sleep, 
Live, strive, regret, forget, and lovej and hate. 
And know it. This spectre saith I wait, 
And at the last it beckons and they pass, 
And still the red sands fall within the glass, 
And still the shades around the dial sweep, 
And still the water-clock doth drip and weep. 
And this is all." 

These bold and irreverent Materialists are met by 
equally bold and irreverent Spiritualists. Christians 
cannot meet them philosophically, unless they appeal to 
the " phenomena " accepted by Spiritualists ; which de- 
velopments most Christians are either too ignorant to 
comprehend, or too proud to accept. 

The Christian testimony upon which faith in the 
New Testament miracles is based, has been assailed 
and invalidated for generations ; so that Materialists 
have no obstacles to encounter save the " inexplicable 
physical phenomena " presented by the troublesome 
and irrepressible Spiritualists. These new evidences of 
"immortality" have not been successfully assailed; 
although the " facts " have been multiplied, and re- 
peated in every part of the civilized world, beyond all 
parallel during the past quarter of a century. In 



204 



JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 



many parts of the world they are just about to come 
forth. Consequently the hosts of doubters are effect- 
ually silenced, but not yet fully convinced ; and so the 
great and good " fight " is certain to terminate. 




POPULAR DOGMAS BARKING AT MODERN SPIRITUALISM. 

And thus we arrive at our second superstition , 
which, nevertheless, is mingled with many momentous 
truths. The illustrious leaders, the 
valiant soldiers, and the high-born 
heroes of this long battle with Ma- 
terialism, have stacked arms and 
encamped upon the ground of in- 
discriminate faith in a constant 
communion with the angels. The 
a comfortable seat UN- bitter enemy is silenced, his guns 

DER A FRUITLESS TREE. J J © 

spiked, his forts dismantled, and 
the flag of " immortality demonstrated," floats proudly 




SORROW AND SUPERSTITION. 



205 



upon the heavenly atmosphere. The realms of shadow 
have been richly furnished with substance. Individ- 
uals believed to be u dead " have responded when their 
names were properly called. Human prejudices have 
given way before the accumulated weight of genuine 
spiritual evidences. And the martyred saints and 
patriots and comrades of the " new era," clothed in 
their shining victorious habiliments, are already in 
danger of conquerors' crowns and martyrs' monuments. 

And why are they not crowned ? Why do not the 
enriched and grateful people erect altars to Spiritualism ? 
Why are not Spiritualists more united in good works ? 
The people's answer 
comes, thus : u If it can 
be shown that Spiritu- 
alism has purified the 
characters and ennobled 
the lives of its votaries, 
we shall be prepared to 
welcome it. But no such 
result is yet apparent, 
and the world must con- 
tinue to regard even its 
highest advocates as en- 
gaged in work unworthy 
of their faculties." 

What rejoinder from us is possible? 




CONFESSION IS GOOD FOR THE SOT7L. 



We have 



206 JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 

braved the perils of the most searching investigation, 
have successfully withstood the shafts of ridicule and 
the destructive assaults of bigotry, and have planted 
our " evidences " upon an impregnable basis ; and yet, 
upon the very threshold, around which our laurels are 
beautifully growing, we are met with an objection, 
which like a flash of lightning demoralizes our grand 
army, fills thousands of honest minds with unhappy 
doubts, and conveys unmerited relief and comfort to 
the bitter enemy whom we. have long since silenced, 
if not vanquished. 

Attributing both good and evil deeds to the direct 
agency of a personal God — out of which has grown 
up a custom of oral petitions and written prayers — this 
superstition has been greatly modified by a large un- 
philosophical class among nominal Spiritualists ; so 
that, as another superstition (with grains of truth in 
it), it stands in this proposition : That in and through 
all human thoughts, feelings, and actions, Spirits are 
incessantly operating as primary causes and control- 
ling powers. Thus a limited number of Spiritualists, 
unconsciously following the affirmation of Swedenborg 
in this particular, because they have not adopted the 
purely philosophical method of investigation, unwit- 
tingly practise upon the dogma that " Spirits can and 
do displace the private will and personal consciousness 
of human minds; and thus, fully possessing and con- 



SORROW AND SUPERSTITION. 207 

trolling such minds, do make manifestations of every 
name and nature, and frequently for their own parti- 
cular selfish gratification." 

Wonderful private experiences are adduced to 
substantiate this exceedingly infantile and easily-ac- 
cepted theory. Because it is scientifically true in part, 
therefore it is believed and acted upon as though it 
were wholly true ; instead of being mostly ai> error, as 
it is, filled with a variety of hurtful subversions of sense 
and conduct. 

One effect is : A narrowing and debilitation of the 
believer's conceptions of the grand system of truths 
and principles ; and the correlative effect is : An 
irreverent familiarity with spirits, on the fallacious 
dogma that spirits, like body-servants and house- 
waiters, are at all moments subject to the will and 
wishes of the questioner. 

One day, in Broadway, a gentleman accosted me 
with : " Mr. Davis, I want your clairvoyant aid in a 
money enterprise in which I am deeply interested." 
Upon inquiry, the fact came out that he was " digging 
for lost treasure " under the directions of some fortune- 
telling medium. 

My reply was emphatically that "I had not a mo- 
ment to give him for any such purpose." Still he urged 
his case by promises of " large sums he was to donate 
at once to charitable works to the everlasting glory of 



208 



JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 



Spiritualism." Again with kindness, but yet more 
emphatically, refusing to give a moment of time to his 
scheme, he replied wilfully : " If you were in the 
spirit-world, Mr. Davis, I would go to my medium and 
make you communicate in five minutes, and as long as 
I pleased ! " 

Such Spiritualism, as is illustrated by the folly and 
shallow superstition of this man, is not worthy a place 




MONET -HUNTING UNDER MEDIUMISTIC DIRECTION. 



in the lowest witchcraft huts of the middle ages. 
u Sir," I said, " do you imagine that I shall have less 
command of my time and person in a higher state of 



SORROW AND SUPERSTITION. 209 

existence than I have at this moment ? " His reply 
was : " Spirits are bound to come when we call them ! 
They have nothing else to do but to look after the 
friends that they have left behind ! " I said : u House- 
servants as obedient to ' calls ? would certainly com- 
mand the highest prices." And further I assured him 
that, speaking for myself, " If I ever returned after 
death to this seventh-rate planet, it wonld be to accom- 
plish some object in accordance with my own affec- 
tions, reason, conscience, and will, and not in response 
to ' the call ' of some selfish money-hunter or any 
other special investigator." Whereupon, of course, he 
marked me forever " out of his books." But to every 



AN ILLUSTRATION OP UNCULTURED INDIVIDUALISM. 

sound mind it must be evident that such Spiritualism, 

considered with reference to its effect upon the struc- 
14 



210 JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 

tare and growth of character, is weakening and decora- 
posing, not to say disintegrating and dwarfing, to the 
last degree. 

A true religion, independent of all tricks and mys- 
teries, can be everywhere known by three signs : (1) 
It causes the person, inwardly, with reverence and 
affection, to look up to the Infinite Perfection ; (2) It 
causes the person to rise to the universal love of man- 
kind, and to deal justly, truthfully, and peacefully 
with every living being ; and (3) it causes the person 
to strive to live physically, mentally, socially, and spir- 
itually, according to that standard of supreme excel- 
lence to which the immortal spirit naturally calls and 
points all mankind. 

If I were asked to give, in brief, the chief good and 
use of this great Spiritualistic movement, my reply 
would be, as heretofore, that the term " Spiritualism " 
is properly applicable to a revival of evidence, appre- 
ciable by the physical senses, that a person is not de- 
stroyed by the chemistry of death, but exists as much 
of an individual as before, and enjoys the privilege of 
travelling in the spiritual universe, and of revisiting 
the earth and holding converse with friends still in the 
flesh. 

Spiritualists teach very generally that " circles " 
and " manifestations " should be multiplied and the 
spirits continually evoked. 



SORROW AND SUPERSTITION. 



211 



On the contrary, I teach and insist that, beyond 
establishing the momentous question, " If a man die, 
shall he live again ? " — beyond a sensuous demonstra- 
tion of the fact of personal immortality — the convening 
of " circles " and the accumulation of repetitious " man- 
ifestations " are not beneficial, but weakening to both 
the sensibilities and the judgment. 




DISTINGUISHED PROFESSORS TRYING TO EXPLAIN SPIRIT MANIFESTATIONS. 



And except for scientific investigations — that is, to 
test the delicacy and wondrous power of spirits over 
material things — it will be found that " dark circles " 
are valueless and injurious. As means of carrying con- 
viction to skeptical minds, the lightless sessions amount 
simply to this : Persons convinced by such evidences 
usually require periodical repetitions of " facts " to keep 
their night-encompassed faith from languishing. 

But, although Spiritualism is not, according to this 



212 JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 

definition, a new religion, it is the herald of a higher 
era of spiritual enlightenment. It hospitably welcomes 
every fresh thought in philosophy, and inspires every 
advancement in science, society, and life. A free de- 
velopment of the essentials of true Religion is one of 
the accompanying effects. 

It must be remembered that in Arabula and else- 
where I have employed this term, " Spiritualism," with 
the largest meanings, in a pure spirit of accommodation 
to the popular use and acceptation. I do not now 
justify such use of the word, although I do not mean 
to recall any of the affirmations under that head ; be- 
cause it is all true of the Dispensation of which spirit- 
ual intercourse is a living part. 

Behold what Spiritualism (in the sense with which 
I now use the term), has already encountered : 

1. Sectarians, in their ignorance and pride, have 
repulsed and spurned it ; 

2. Skeptics, in their strongholds of materialism, 
have ridiculed and neglected it ; 

3. Spiritualists, in their familiarity and fanaticism, 
have covered it with imperfections and chaos. 

Familiarity is the temporary suspension of all rules 
of delicacy and veneration. If this is true, right here, 
between man and man, how much more must it be 
true as between earthlings and their celestial visitors ! 

It is an abuse of such exalted intercourse to try to 



SORROW AND SUPERSTITION. 213 

make it subservient to personal ends. The sad misfor- 
tunes which befall many mediums, and some Spiritual- 
ists, can be traced directly to this outrageous selfish 
practice. With many the practical uses of medium- 
ship are adopted as purely mercenary. Fortune-tell- 
ing and treasure-hunting characterize the faith and 
conduct of too many believers. And the direful con- 
sequences of these crimes are upon us all. 

It was true that the doors and windows of heaven 
were opened, and, happily, it is true that they are still 
open ; and it is also true that angels often descended ; 
and, happily, it is true that they are still descending, 
with the abundant showers of their sweet influences, 
to bless and elevate humanity. 

But the legitimate punishments of transgressed laws 
and violated conditions are also descending upon the 
disobedient world. The delicate fineness, not to say the 
modest self-respect, of our celestial visitors compels 
them to shrink away from these prolonged abuses — the 
practice of using mediums and spirits for selfish ends 
and temporary benefits. Their justice and then 1 power 
are being silently concentrated to resist and to punish 
such grovelling malpractices. 

One punishment, which must deeply sadden every 
sincere heart, is : The withdrawal from direct inter- 
course with earth's inhabitants of scores of truly great 
and learned minds ! 



214 JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 

This proceeding is going forward at this moment 
in every direction. 

Thus the grand use of spiritual intercourse — " a 
living demonstration " — is rapidly passing into record- 
ed history. The refreshing shower from the spiritual 
skies is well-nigh over. By this is not meant that all 
communication is to cease ; nor that a renewal is not 
possible in response to worthy solicitation. 

Humanity has many times before approached, and 
enjoyed, and passed through, these wonderful epochs 
of contact with the celestial spheres, and the believers 
have been before, as again they are about to be, affiict- 
ively punished for sacrilegious treatment of privileges 
so high and pleasures so holy. 

It seems mournful that mankind cannot at once and 
universally obey the laws of Nature, Reason, and In- 
tuition. Especially in the realm of religious feelings 
and faith, it is sad that principles and Ideas cannot be 
accepted by which to judge all phenomena and human 
testimony concerning them. But the explanation is, 
that the world lives progressively in emotion and in 
feeling, and does not easily and quickly arrive at the 
lofty blessings of thought, reflection, and intuition ; so 
that, unless men surrender themselves obediently in 
all matters of doctrine to some supreme " dogma of in- 
fallibility," unless all bow to some external standard of 
authority, it is but natural that most persons should 



SORROW AND SUPERSTITION. 215 

become involved in many errors and superstitiQns 
while independently searching for truth. 

Among the errors and hurtful superstitions which 
have sprung up in modern fields — in fields where we 
fondly hoped the immortal flowers of Reason alone 
would grow and forever bloom— I will in this place 
mentioi} only nine, as follows : 

1. That departed spirits, both good and evil, con- 
tinually float and drive about in the earth's physical 
atmosphere ; 

2. That evil-disposed characters, having died in 
their active sins, linger around men and women both 
day and night, in order to gratify their unsatisfied 
passions and prevailing propensities ; 

3. That all known mental disturbances — such as in- 
sanity, murder, suicide, licentiousness, arson, theft, and 
various evil impulses and deeds — are caused by the 
direct action of the will of false and malignant spirits ; 

4. That certain passionate spirits, opposed to purity 
and truth and goodness, are busy breaking up the ten- 
der ties of families and take delight in separating per- 
sons living happily in the marriage relation ; 

5. That spirits are at all times subject to summons, 
and can be " called up " or made to " appear " in 
circles ; and that the " mediums " have no private 
rights or powers of will which the spirits are bound to 
respect ; 



216 JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 

6. That spirits are both substantial and immaterial ; 
that they traverse the empire of solids, and bolt 
through solid substances, without respecting any of 
the laws of solids and substances ; and that they can 
perform any thing they like to astonish the investi- 
gator ; 

7. That every human being is a medium, in one 
form or another, and to some extent ; and that all per- 
sons, unconsciously to themselves, are acting out the 
feelings, the will, and the mind of spirits ; 

8. That spiritual intercourse is perpetual ; that it is 
now everywhere operative ; and that, being at last 
established, it cannot be again suspended ; 

9. That the reading of books and reflection, as a 
means of obtaining truth, are no longer necessary to 
believers ; that the guardian band of spirits will im- 
part to the faithful every thing worth knowing ; and 
that, for any thing further, one need only wait upon 
the promptings of intuition, and that, in any event, 
" whatever is, is right." 

These errors, these superstitions, and these dog- 
mas, like all other human developments, contain 
rich intimations and germs of truth. These theories 
have taken deep root among a large class of avowed 
Spiritualists. And the legitimate effects, it will be 
remembered, are visible in the disintegrations and de- 
compositions of character ; in mutual disrespect and 



SORROW AND SUPERSTITION. 



217 




A CREED-CRUSHER EARNESTLY RECOM 
XENDED. 



recriminations ; in the disorganization of all our public 
efforts, and tlie abandonment of our beneficent enter- 
prises ; in the irreverence manifested toward even the 
great central Princi- 
ples around which all 
persons and facts 
must bow and cling ; 
and, lastly, in the 
gradual suspension of 
the delightful inter- HH 
course itself, by which 
the glory and un- 
speakable opportuni- 
ties of immortality have been brought to light. 

After twenty-five years of constant investigation 
into the many and various phases of 
this subject, and with almost daily 
realizations of somewhat of the infinite 
goodness embosomed in these high 
privileges, I can most solemnly affirm, 
and I do now make the declaration, 
that the nine propositions contained 
in. the indictment, are mostly errors and hurtful the- 
ories — injurious in their effect upon the individual 
judgment, and still more injurious when made the 
foundation of faith and practice. They belong to the 
age of broom-riding witches ; to the shallow doctrines 




A PROCESS THROUGH 

WHICH EVERY CREED 

SHOULD PASS. 



218 



JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 



of personal devils and sorcery ; and to the fiction-age 
of astrology and the small gods of superstition. They 
will not bear analysis by the philosophical method of 
detecting the presence and value of truth. They will 
not stand a test by the supreme infallible authorities — 
Nature, Reason, Intuition. This affirmation is made 
without qualification ; and it contains a challenge — a 
summons to investigation. 




AN AGENT OP SAINT CUSTOM PUTTING A COLLAR OVER THE HEAD OF THAT 
WHICH IS STRONG AND USEFUL IN SPIRITUALISM. 



Instead of the assertion that spirits are continually 



SORROW AND SUPERSTITION". 219 

present, and the belief that they are instantly engaged 
in influencing human feelings, convictions, and con- 
duct — instead of this, it would be far nearer the exact 
truth to say : 

" Spirits even now rarely communicate with 

MEN." 

Numberless absurdities spring from the supposition 
that mankind are continually in contact with citizens 
of the air. It is, alas ! too high a privilege, too deli- 
cate a luxury for the human heart, to be frequently 
mingled with current experiences. The percentage of 
intercommunication, O, believe me ! is still very small. 
It is yet the exception in human life, I am constrained 
to affirm, and not the rule. More contact with the 
spiritual life is what the world most needs. 

What, then, are we to do ? Are we admonished to 
retire from the spiritual movement ? Shall we aban- 
don life because it is burdened with trials and imper- 
fections ? All delicate relations are attended with 
great risks and enjoyed amid great dangers : Shall we, 
therefore, refuse to enter into them ? Nothing noble 
or heroic can be achieved without labors and dangers 
of greater or less magnitude. Therefore, although un- 
diluted intercourse with the celestial citizens is still 
rare, yet the grand prize (the knowledge that personal 
life is continued beyond the grave /) is worthy the exer- 
tions of the finest powers of every doubting mind. 



220 JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 

But remember, O, most friendly reader ! that all 
other uses of the high privilege of spiritual intercom- 
munication — except when it comes in response to the 
unselfish prayers of friendship and love — are flagrant 
violations of its fixed laws, are transgressions of its 
delicate conditions, which cannot but be followed by 
innumerable mortifications and various disastrous pun- 
ishments. 

In conclusion, this one word : Prayer is sometimes 
a key, by which the golden door of infinite opportuni- 
ties may be unlocked ; and, sometimes, prayer calls to 
our immediate aid those wise and strong guardians, 
who daily live in harmony with the eternal currents 
of affection. 




XIV. 



Effect of a Mistake in Religion. 



A SERIES of supplemental considerations for thee, 
O faithful reader ! in continuation of the general 
subject treated in the last chapter, as follows : 

Spiritualism, which is sometimes called u spiritism," 
has justly inspired hundreds and thousands of noble 
hearts with the fondest hopes for humanity. Highly 
endowed intellects have been by its immense promises 
filled with the most brilliant anticipations. Many of 
these fond hopes have perished ; many a bright prom- 
ise has been toned down to the verge of despair. 



222 



JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 



Hundreds of the professors of Spiritualism have retired 
into the frigid, barren, and inhospitable, yet popular, 
territories of conservatism. The movement was, and 
is, full of aggressive and progressive minds ; and it is 
correspondingly empty of constructive and charitable 
labors for human advancement. Nowhere on the good 
Father's footstool can be found a richer soil so ut- 
terly grainless and unproductive. No other existing 
movement embraces so many enlarged ideas, quickens 
so many generous instincts, inspires so many impressi- 
ble minds, opens so many grand scenes for mankind ; 
and yet, to tell the plain truth, no other movement, of 
the same age and with the same wealth of opportuni- 
ties, ever exhibited more miserly stinginess in its ap- 
propriations for worthy enterprises, or more senseless 
extravagance in rewarding individuals for the selfish 
use of their powers. 







"AS THE TWIG IS BENT, THE TREE IS INCLINED." 



MISTAKE IN RELIGION. 223 

The beautiful tree bears but little practical fruit for 
the millions of the globe, because of the existence of an 
error j which like a devouring worm, lives in the very 
foundation, and which is day by day eating out the 
life of its finest roots. 

This destructive error is the general misapprehen- 
sion, entertained by the intelligent and the ignorant 
alike, that the fact of communication with the other 
world is worthy of exaltation to the dignity of a re- 
ligion, and that the constant prayer for and enjoyment 
of such intercourse is the practice of religion. 

u In all kindness," says one of our most prominent 
writers, "we ask, is not Spiritualism founded on the 
revelations of mediums ? Could it have sprung into 
existence without them ? " My reply is : " Certainly 
not ; and simply because Spiritualism has no other 
foundation, it is radically incapable of becoming a 
practical religion." Some of our best workers and 
most philosophical thinkers have strenuously advocated 
this error (of a medium-originated religion), as if it 
were the most solemn and momentous truth — adequate, 
when believed in and acted* upon, to overcome all pri- 
vate human ills, and adequate not less to work in 
society universal redemption from every form of evil 
and wretchedness. The reduction of this central rad- 
ical error to a sort of independent individual practice 
has eventuated in the belittling and wretchedly barren 



224 



JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 



crop of small gratifications, which have come to all 
such self-painstaking practitioners. 




MEN HEAP FROM THE SEEDS THEY PLANT. 

What is such a religion reduced to practice ? It is 
simply and only and forever nothing more than the 
private drawing-room development of mediums, and 
the night-after-night communications with spirits of 
every name and nature — with friends and foes alike — 
and for no purpose other than the immediate gratifica- 
tion which may arise from having your great mental 
powers applauded and flattered, your fond hopes 
illuminated with immense promises of wonderful works 
in store for you, and your feelings poetically excited 
and your industry lulled to sleep by assurances that 
" angels will take care of you," and that the slowly 
rolling ages will bring every thing straight and 
smoothe all the rough places. 

With such delightful convictions, the illogical pro* 



MISTAKE IN RELIGION. 



225 



fessor of Spiritualism goes out into the busy world 
dreamily, like an opium-eater, full of enchanting sub- 
jective sensations and thoughtful ambitions, but really 
and practically with but one ever-present and all- 
mastering motive : Personally to enjoy the present 
life ! Do things go wrong about you ? " Wonder 




INCONSISTENCIES RECONCILED BY COERCION AND FEAR. 



why the spirits don't step in and make every thing 
smooth and right." Do your children need to be 
saved from theological errors, and put upon the health- 
track, and taught to do their own thinking and work 
in the world ? " Let them go to some church or send 
them to Sunday-school, and let them adopt the ways 
of society. A working organization, founded upon a 
declaration of principles, is another sectarian move- 
ment ; therefore it must die, because we will have no 
more association with sectarianism." 
15 



226 JETS 0F NEW MEANINGS. 

Are there old dogmas and old practices to be over- 
come ? " Certainly ! Spiritualism is the infallible cure- 
all — the leaven of old institutions ! Let the churches 
absorb it (which they are doing very rapidly), and the 
result will be a radical modification of old theology." 

All these sayings come flowing free from the 
mouths of the professors of Spiritualism. Still they 
claim to be philosophers ! They really think that 
they are logical reasoners ! Many of them fancy that 
they have fathomed the deeps of human history ! And 
a few believe that they know all of any importance that 
can be said or written this side of the loftiest angels. 
And thus they are, (only, however, in their imagina- 
tions,) above all authority, having arrived at the estate 
of free religion and perfect self-control ; and yet a 
medium, if believed to be " under a high control," 
need but say " Go," and they depart, or " Come," and 
they approach, obediently like well-drilled soldiers un- 
der an unseen commander. 

Freely and honestly I have written against the pro- 
fessors and teachings of old religions, and against pop- 
ular speculations, called " orthodox theology." Over 
and again I have denounced their most sacred faiths as 
weak and soul-cramping superstitions. I do so still, 
and retract nothing ; neither asking nor giving quar- 
ter ; never compromising with error, nor favoring any 
forms which oppose the freedom and progress of man- 



MISTAKE IN RELIGION. 



227 



kind. Here an old question, founded in a principle 
of charity and justice, may be repeated : " "Why be- 
hold est thou the mote 
that is in thy brother's 
eye, but considerest not 
the beam that is in thine 
own eye ? " 

And now, in this spir- 
it, without wishing to 
give a grain of comfort to 
the enemies of Spiritual- 
ism, I am constrained, in 
the interest of truth and 
humanity, to speak as 
freely and honestly against 
the radical errors in both G0 forward without fear when 

41 ON THE RIGHT TRACK." 

faith and practice, which 

have cropped out among spiritualists. As in my heart 
there is not one feeling of unkindness or bitterness 
toward any believer in any Church or Bible ; so there 
is nothing but earnest fraternal love toward all men, 
inspired by a still more profound love of truth and en- 
franchised reason, which moves me to indite these 
protestations. 

Spiritualism, when properly defined with its limita- 
tions, is not a religion ; and the practice of communi- 
cating with spirits, however delightful to the better 




228 



JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 



feelings, is not the practice of religion ; and, therefore, 
spiritualists (i. e. spirit-communicants), are not neces- 
sarily a religious people. The seed of Spiritualism is 
spiritual intercourse. Can the fruit of a tree differ 
from its seed ? If your religion begins in the practice 
of holding such communications, where will it end ? 
It is a circle, and will end just where and just as it be- 
gun, in the practice of commerce with spirits. Pri- 
mates and ultimates resemble one another, as grain bears 




BIRDS ARE SOMETIMES INFLUENCED BY SPIRITS. 

a likeness to its germs. If Christianity relied wholly 
upon miracles for its existence, it would have died 
when its seed-causes (the miracles), were suspended 
and practically abolished. Interior ideas, and not won- 
derful works, were the vitals of the movement ; there- 
fore, the cessation of the (so-called) miracles, which 
only illustrated the ideas, did not destroy Christianity. 
The ideas and doctrines of Christianity constitute its 



MISTAKE IN RELIGION. 229 

religion and theology, and the practice of its ideas and 
precepts constitutes the practice of its religion ; and 
thus it will live and flourish, and originate and control 
governments and educational institutions, until better 
ideas and better precepts eventually modify and super- 
sede them. All this undeviatingly proceeds, like the 
universe itself, upon the principle that " effects and 
causes correspond." 

It is folly of the most foolish quality to expect sal- 
vation through the performances and wonderful works 
of any self-asserting special son of God; and not less 
senseless is the presumptive faith that the state of 
mediumship, and the consequent sympathetic commerce 
with the citizens of the next world, will upbuild indi- 
vidual character and carry forward the grand ends of 
growth in humanity. 

The effect of the first error, when fully accepted 
and acted upon, is visible in the startling imperfections 
which crop out in the character and conduct of Chris- 
tians ; and the effect of the second error, when reduced 
to faith and practice, is manifested in the characterless 
sentimentalities and non-productiveness of theoretical 
Spiritualists. 

Spiritualism, as I have frequently used the term, by 
way of accommodation, from a purely harmonial out- 
look, may be truthfully called a religion ; but when 
strictly interpreted, and measured and valued by its 



230 JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 

scientific claims alone, it is little more than another 
name for a belief in and knowledge of " Spiritual In- 
tercourse." And this last definition, which is the only 
interpretation a careful thinker can conscientiously 
give to the term, also defines the uses and abuses of it 
which abound. Those who have unphilosophically 
insisted upon a wider definition, who have been loudest 
in proclaiming " Spiritualism " as the all-in-all of a 
New dispensation, who have, while encouraging the 
most extravagant egoistic manifestations of individual- 
ism, advocated a declaration of principles as the basis 




THE PROGRESSIVE TRACK OF SPIRIT-FACTS RUNS ALONG THE 
RIVER OF PRINCIPLES. 

of an organization of its powers and professors — such 
will find, sooner or later, that, by a radical error in 
their definition, they have established and encouraged 
a radical error in practice, to the advantage and vital- 



MISTAKE IN RELIGION. 231 

ization of the all-appropriating churches, and to the 
corresponding disadvantage and debilitation of the 
freely-imparting tendencies of the central good there is 
in a demonstrated immortality. 

Ideas and indestructible Principles, and not the 
wonders of communications with persons residing be- 
yond the tomb, are the seed-causes of progress and re- 
construction. 

The eternal Truth, as it is revealed through the 
beautiful mediums of Love and Justice, is the only 
everlasting standard. 

Science is a sure safeguard against superstition. 

Reason is the exponent of truth to the intellect ; 
even as Intuition is truth's exponent to the affections. 

Religion is true and undefiled when it is absolutely 
free — independent of dogmatic theology on the one 
hand, and free of fleeting marvels and superstition on 
the other — free as immortal love and truth are free, a 
power of eternal Good and Right in the indestructible 
constitution of the Spirit, removing error and distribut- 
ing justice throughout the world. 

Wisdom is the most sacred name, above every other 
name, unto which every knee should bow and every 
tongue confess. Our Redeemer is Wisdom ! whose 
ways are pleasant ; whose paths are peace ; whose 
heart is Mother Nature ; whose head is Father God ; 
who saves the whole world with an everlasting salva- 



232 JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 

tion. Truth, Love, Justice, Wisdom — each an angel 
of life, light, and happiness ! Let us strive to com- 
municate with them ; let us listen reverently to no 
other voices ; let us obey no other authorities. 




XV. 



Omens and Signs Among Religionists. 

EVERY philosopher must decide that it is unrea- 
sonable to expect, in the present stage of human 
progress, the general diffusion of any religious faith 
without a corresponding expansion of refined forms of 
fear and superstition. Those who delight themselves 
chiefly in the feelings and mysteries of religion possess 
little ability to reason philosophically concerning the 
laws and requirements of truth. Every established 
system of religious faith, and every denomination of 
faith in every such system, is supported by multitudes 
who utterly repudiate Reason as an authoritative ex- 
ponent of religion. 



234 JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 

Supernaturalism, being intrinsically nothing but 
unnaturalism, is the mother of innumerable fears and 
superstitions. If a new phase of the spiritual comes, 
like the wonders of modern Spiritualism, large acces- 
sions are made from the ranks of old and existing sys- 
tems. As the converted Gentiles of the olden time car- 
ried into Judaism their long-cherished myths, fears and 
follies ; so converts from Judaism convey many of their 
ancestral rites, omens, and superstitions into Christian- 
ity ; even as Christians, converted to Spiritualism, bring 
with them a long baggage-train of prejudices, weak- 
nesses, fears, and superstitions, whose maternal ancestor 
is Supernaturalism, which is the foundation of the 
entire superstructure of Christianity. 

" Faithful are the wounds of a friend." Infantile 
states of mind demand a religion of " rattles and 
straws ; " which the estate of manhood utterly rejects 
as " childish things." Therefore human nature, before 
it comes to a knowledge of fixed principles, naturally 
believes in signs, omens, and superstitions ; which crop 
out of the spirit's instinctive trust and comfort in the 
idea of an arbitrary protective Providence. 

Helpless and weak and wretched is human nature, 
in its physical and mental infancy ; beset on every side 
with mysteries, contingencies, calamities, and misfor- 
tunes. Life's changes are charged with alternate de- 
feats and victories. We do not stop to think when sur- 



OMENS AND SIGNS. 



235 



rounded by dangers, and when encompassed by number- 
less difficulties, which, threaten to crush and destroy. 

From the visible the feelings yearn for protection 
from the invisible. With firm reliance upon an in- 
finitely wise Providence, overflowing with illimitable 
power and with equal goodness, thousands of persons 
in every system of religion will brave any danger and 
attack obstacles of every magnitude. 

Men are fatalists in these affairs of religion, and 
many minds have hope and patience and cheerful cour- 
age under mysterious trust and faith ; while under 
Reason and Conscience, as counsellor and guide, the 
same persons would sink into helplessness and despair. 
There are persons who do physical wonders, and ex- 
hibit abilities not to be matched, only while under the 
effect of some powerful stimulant or mental excitement. 

Faith in the invisible is pe- 
rennially important. But it 
exists not without dangers and 
absurdities to the faithful ; even 
while it brings tender comfort 
and sweet trust into the relig- 
ious feelings. Unless the judg- 
ment is fortified in knowledge, 




the faith becomes extravagant 



THE END OF LIFE TO THOSE 
WHO SEE NOT. 



and superstitious, and the be- 
liever is easily influenced by omens, signs, spectres, 



236 



JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 




wraiths, forerunners, and whimsical prognostications 
of future events. 

A sailor, who cared nothing for storms and dangers, 

could not be induced to 
go out one fine morning 
with some fishermen, 
because the night before 
he encountered a bat 
behind a broom in his 
cabin on the beach. He 
was a good Methodist^ 
believed in a personal 
God, and in a kind of 
Providence which sends 
to a believer distinct 
signs of impending disaster. 

Heaven's ante-chamber would seem, according to 

some providence-believers, to 
be a place of evil. I know 
a distinguished preacher and 
orator who confessed that to 
see the moon for the first 
time after her change over 
the left shoulder, is certain 
immediately to depress his 
feelings ; and his mind is 
filled with vague apprehensions, whenever he thinks 



A SAILOR S UNLUCKY OMEN. 




SAW THE MOON OVER HIS LEFT 
SHOULDER. 



OMENS AND SIGNS. 



237 



of the omen, during the entire month. Notwithstand- 
ing the fact that his judgment rejects the omen as 
sheer superstition, his feelings and conduct are never- 
theless more or less unhappily affected by the trifling 
circumstance, simply because the supposed significance 
of the fact was mingled with his early education. 

Not many months since I received a letter from an 
unmarried woman, who had what she deemed the mis- 




A STRANGE CAT RAN INTO THE HOUSE WHILE THEY WERE TALKING 

fortune of seeing a strange cat run into the door just as 
her sister's only son was about to commence a horse- 
back journey in company with a neighbor. She had 
received a good education, and she was rather ashamed 
to confess to any apprehensions arising from the fore- 
runner ; but she could not shake off the old Welsh 
rustic belief that, unless the cat was caught and con- 
fined in the house a day and a night, some dire ca- 



238 JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 

lamity would overtake the darling boy. She had also 
been recently disturbed by bad dreams of muddy 
water, especially since the youth had commenced the 
journey ; and on several nights that same neighbor's 
dog had foreshadowed the worst fortune by howling 
most dismally ; and there were also other signs of 
trouble. 

Her fears were so excited that, although she was a 
theoretical believer in the doctrine of a fixed natural 
law within the cause of every event, she could not 
shake oft* the painful anxiety and foreboding. In reply 
I urged upon her the supreme authority of Reason ; 
that her dark and melancholy apprehensions were 
probably owing to her early miseducation in the super- 
naturalism of Christianity ; and that, besides, there was 
possibly some phrenological or physiological cause for 
the sufferings she experienced. 

I tried, as delicately as possible, to intimate that 
the " dreams of muddy water " originated in some bad 
condition of the brain or bile ; and intimated, also, 
that I should be glad to see her photographic likeness, 
in order to determine the temperaments of a person so 
filled with faith and doubts concerning symbolic signs 
and omens. Her answer, which covered her photo- 
graphic likeness, was couched in terms of earnest pro- 
test ; giving her opinion most decidedly to the effect, 
that she had a firm trust in a supreme Being of infinite 



OMENS AND SIGNS. 239 

power and wisdom ; but did not doubt but that, some- 
times, He permitted looking-glasses to break, dogs to 
howl, and imparted bad dreams to presage a death, or 
to warn people of impending evil. She entertained a 



A DREAMER OF BAD DREAMS. 



natural dread of ridicule, however ; and it is my con- 
viction that this dread, more than the exercise of her 
reason, limited the indulgence of her superstitious fears. 
She was not a believer in Spiritualism, but had great 
faith in the fortune-telling faculty of some mediums. 

The inhabitants of India suffer vastly from snake- 
bites, and the havoc caused by man-eating tigers, leo- 
pards, and other wild beasts of the jungle. In the 
Central Provinces the loss of human life by tigers, 



240 



JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 



wolves, hysenas, leopards, bears, and panthers, is im- 
mense. We learn that superstition also plays no small 

part in the mainte- 
nance of these intol- 
erable scourges. The 
Gonds, for instance, 
instead of mustering 
in force to hunt down 
the tigers who wage 
war against them and 
their herds, have an 
idiotic way of regard- 
ing the tiger as a 
divinity whose wrath 
it is unsafe to arouse. 
If one of them falls a 
prey to the divinity's 
appetite for human 
flesh, the rest of the 
family are forthwith tabooed as displeasing to the ob- 
ject of their reverent dread, and must expiate their 
offence by costly sacrifices, which may leave them pen- 
niless but will restore them to their caste-rights. 

What misery comes from the womb of Ignorance ! 
Disordered imaginations, the changing and inclement 
skies of superstition, entail distress and wretchedness 
upon human nature. We listen with reverence to the 




BAD DREAMS OF ONE NOT A TEE-TOTALLER. 



OMENS AND SIGNS. 241 

dictates of truth, while with abhorrence we hear the 
prayers of superstition. A firm believer in spiritual 
intercourse, I know, is not exempt from the bitter 
struggles and horrible notions fixed in the religious 
imagination by having once believed in popular theol- 
ogy. They are afraid of u ghosts and graveyards," 
and dread encountering " imps of darkness," and suf- 
fering many deaths by being in " bondage through fear 
of death." At length they obtain a life-long emanci- 
pation by being converted to the evidences of spiritual 
intercourse. And yet I know a Spiritualist, who would 
repel with scornful emotions the least insinuation that 
he is superstitious, who was one day absolutely dis- 
heartened in the prosecution of a worthy enterprise, 
because by chance a striped squirrel ran across the 
path in a grove through which he was walking toward 




INNOCENTS PLATING IN THE GROVE. 



the residence of a friend. Esteemed for his wit and 
geniality, and beloved for his strict integrity and high 



16 



242 



JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 



moral principles, and yet so suddenly weakened and 
turned from his purpose by what he considered " a bad 
sign ! " 

Strong intellects cannot escape the effect of the 
memory of u signs," and the occurrence of events de- 
noting " evil," which they learned by heart in child- 
hood. The human spirit, naturally reaching into the 
invisible after aid, and craving sympathy in its trials 
and dangers, is sensitively alive to the teachings and 
influence of fate. In spite of the keen shafts of ridi- 
cule, and in opposition to the plainest dictates of com- 
mon sense and accept- 
ed science, it is easy 
for eight-tenths of ev- 
ery population by in- 
sensible degrees to lean 
to the side of ignorance 
and superstition. Upon 
no other principle can 
a philosopher account 
for the wide - spread 
acceptance throughout 
civilization of this dis- 
mal thing which calls 
itself " Christian The- 
ology." Thousands up- 
on thousands in mis- 




A BIRD OP EVIL OMEN. 



OMENS AND SIGNS. 



243 



erable homes and mad-houses realize the unutterable 
horrors implanted by a cateehismal education into the 
deplorable superstitions of literal hells of fire and brim- 
stone, a personal devil of magnificent abilities in eternal 
opposition to Deity, and all the thirty-nine other name- 
less nightmares and mythic horrors which float current- 
ly as great truths in the best Christian communities. 

Physiologists have 
demonstrated that the 
" hog," although not a 
medium for the lesser 
devils as reported in 
story, is a first-class 
boarding-house for mil- 
lions of m a n-killing 
worms. Scrofulous 
diseases, not personal 
devils, arise from the 
post - mortem remains 
of swine. Christians 
still continue to eat 
this devil-meat ; over 

which many daily " ask blessings " and subsequently 
" return thanks ; " as if the God of eternal and unalter- 
able truth and justice would or could, by special mir- 
acle, convert pork into piety and scrofula into rose- 
tints on the lovely cheeks of childhood ! 







ANOTHER BAD SIGN. 



244 



JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 



Bad dreams naturally visit the brains of pork-eating 
Christians. Impossible works cannot be wrought ; all 




A PORK-EATER AND WINE-BIBBER PREPARING FOR A DREAM. 

things are not possible. It is a weak and wicked 
superstition to believe and teach that an unchangeable 
Deity is engaged in listening to and answering the 
selfish prayers of pork-devouring and wine-engulfing 
believers. The fixed laws of the spirit, graceful in 
their dealings and eternally protective in their govern- 
ment, guard the citidal of human life. No act goes 
unrecorded ; no transgression escapes punishment. 
Mercy is manifested in the gentleness of the record, 
and in the complete and perfect redemption they ac-. 



OMENS AND SIGNS. 



245 



complish in the offending spirit. The transgressor's 
way is very hard, and his salvation greater in agony 
than the pains of a fabled hell. The human mind is 
constituted for an eternal 
search after and progres- 
sion in Good ! Any other 
use of its great powers — 
all mere search after that 
folly which the ignorant 
call u happiness " — is be- 
set with calamities and 
wretched defeats. Why 
cannot men look into the 
laws of life, from a pure- 




THE OLD MAN'S AFTER-DINNER DREAM. 



ly honest observation of 

its principles and purposes, and thus harmonize with 

its constitutional needs 
and eternal ends ? The 
numberless evils of the 
world are the offspring 
__- ~^- ~ of ignorance ; then, the 
brood being hatched 
and multiplied, a mil- 
lion-sided net of self in- 
terests encloses the evils 
and protects them as 
though they were good ; 




DREAMS OF FLOODS AND FAMINE. 



246 



JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 



the effect is oppression and general wretchedness, and 
the end is revolution. 

In order to illustrate what I mean by tracing out 
u by honest observation " the laws and the evils of life, 

let us read Dr. Hachen- 
b erg's very faithful ac- 
count of Indian Trailers 
and Trappers, in his let- 
ter from U. S. A. Post 
JP< Hospital, Fort Band all, 
Dacotah Territory, to the 
Hudson Star, February 
12, 1869, as follows : 

" The most extraor- 
dinary skill that is exhib- 
ited in this part of the 
country, either by the white man or red native, is the 
practice of trailing. Here it may be accounted an art 
as much as music, painting, or sculpture is in the East. 
The Indian or trapper that is a shrewd trailer, is a man 
of close observation, quick perception, and prompt 
action. As he goes along, nothing escapes his obser- 
vation, and what he sees and hears he accounts for im- 
mediately. Often not another step is taken until a 
mystery, that may present itself in this line, is fairly 
solved. The Indian trailer will stand still for hours in 
succession, to account for certain traces or effects in 




A BELIEVER IN SIGNS AND OMENS. 



OMENS AND SIGNS. 247 

tracks, and sometimes give to the matter unremitting 
attention for days and weeks. 

" The trailer is not a graceful man. He carries his 
head much inclined, his eye is quick and restless, 
always on the watch, and he is practising his art un- 
consciously, hardly ever crossing the track of man or 
animal without seeing it. When he enters a house, he 
brings the habits he contracted in the practice of his 
art with him. I know a trailer as soon as he enters 
my room. He comes in through the door softly, and 
with an air of exceeding caution. Before he is fairly 
in, or, at least, has sat down, he has taken note of every 
article and person, though there may be a dozen va- 
cant chairs in the room. He is not used to chairs, and, 
like the Indian, prefers a more humble seat. When I 
was employed by General Harney, last summer, to 
take charge temporarily of the Indians that were gath- 
ered here to form a new reservation, one day a guide 
and trailer came into the General's headquarters. I 
told him to be seated. He sat down on the floor, brac- 
ing his back against the wall. The General saw this, 
and in vexation cried out, ' My God, why don't you 
take a chair, when there are plenty here not occupied ? ' 
The man arose and seated himself in a chair, but in so 
awkward and uncomfortable a manner that he looked 
as if he might slip from it at any moment. But when 
this uncouth person came to transact his business with 



248 JE TS OF NEW MEANINGS. 

the General, he turned out to be a man of no ordinary- 
abilities. His description of a route he took as guide 
and trailer for the Ogallalas in bringing them from the 
Platte to this place was minute, and to me exceedingly 
interesting. Every war party that for the season had 
crossed his trail, he described with minuteness as to 
their number, the kinds of arms they had, and stated 
the tribes they belonged to. In these strange revela- 
tions that he made there was neither imposition nor 
supposition, for he gave satisfactory reasons for every 
assertion he made. 

" I have rode several hundred miles with an expe- 
rienced guide and trailer, Hack, whom I interrogated 
upon many points in the practice of this art. Nearly 
all tracks I saw, either old or new, as a novice in the 
art, I questioned him about. In going to the Niobrara 
River we crossed the track of an Indian pony. My 
guide followed the track a few miles and then said, ' It 
is a stray, black horse, with a long, bushy tail, nearly 
starved to death, has a split hoof of the left fore foot, 
and goes very lame, and he passed here early this 
morning.' Astonished and incredulous, I asked him 
the reasons for knowing these particulars by the tracks 
of the animal, when he replied : ' It was a stray horse, 
because it did not go in a direct line ; his tail was long, 
for he dragged it over the snow ; in brushing against a 
bush he left some of his hair, which shows its color. 



OMENS AND SIGNS. 249 

He was very hungry, for, in going along, lie has nipped 
at those high, dry weeds, which horses seldom eat. 
The fissure of the left fore-foot left, also, its track, and 
the depth of the indentation shows the degree of his 
lameness ; and his tracks show he was here this morn- 
ing, when the snow was hard with frost. 5 

u At another place we came across an Indian 
track, and he said, ' It is an old Yankton, who came 
across the Missouri last evening to look at his traps. 
In coming over he carried in his right hand a trap, and 
in his left a lasso to catch a pony w T hich he had lost. 
He returned without finding the horse, but had caught 
in the trap he had out a prairie wolf, which he carried 
home on his back and a bundle of kinikinic wood in 
his right hand.' Then, he gave his reasons : c I know 
he is old, by the impression his gait has made and a 
Yankton by that of his moccasin. He is from the other 
side of the river, as there are no Yanktons on this side. 
The trap he carried struck the snow now and then, and 
in same manner as when he came, shows that he did 
not find his pony. A drop of blood in the centre of 
his tracks shows that he carried the wolf on his back, 
and the bundle of kinikinic wood he used for a staff for 
support, and catching a wolf, shows that he had traps 
out.' ' But, I asked, how do you know it is a wolf? 
why not a fox or a coyotte, or even a deer ? ' Said he, 
' If it had been a fox, or a coyotte, or any other small 



250 JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 

game, he would have slipped the head of the animal in 
his waist belt, and so carried it by his side, and not on 
his shoulders. Deer are not caught by traps, but if it 
had been a deer, he would not have crossed this high 
hill, but would have gone back by way of the ravine, 
and the load would have made his steps still more tot- 
tering.' 

" Another Indian track we saw twenty miles west 
of this he put this serious construction upon : ' He is 
an upper Indian — a prowling horse thief — carried a 
double-shot gun, and is a rascal that killed some white 
man lately, and passed here one week ago ; for,' said 
he, ' a lone Indian in these parts is on mischief, and 
generally on the lookout for horses. He had on the 
shoes of a white man whom he had in all probability 
killed, but his steps are those of an Indian. Going 
through the ravine, the end of his gun hit into the deep 
snow. A week ago we had a very warm day, and the 
snow being soft, he made these deep tracks ; ever since 
it has been intensely cold weather, which makes very 
shallow tracks.' I suggested that perhaps he bought 
those shoes. ' Indians don't buy shoes, and if they 
did they would not buy them as large as these were, 
for Indians have very small feet.' The most noted 
trailer of this country was Paul Daloria, a half-breed, 
who died under my hands, of Indian consumption, 
last summer. I have spoken of him in a former letter. 



OMEXS AND SIGXS. 251 

At one time I rode with him, and trailing was nat- 
urally the subject of our conversation. I begged to 
trail with him an old track over the prairie, in order to 
learn its history. I had hardly made the proposition, 
when he drew up his horse, which was at a ravine, and 
said, ' Well, here is an old elk track. Let us get off 
our horses and follow it.' We followed it bnt a few 
rods, when he said, it was exactly a month old, and 
made at 2 o'clock in the afternoon. This he knew, as 
then we had our last rain, and at the hour named the 
ground was softer than at any other time. The track 
before us was then made. He broke up here and there 
clusters of grass that lay in the path of the track, and 
showed me the dry ends of some, the stumps of others, 
and by numerous other similar items accounted for 
many circumstances that astonished me. We followed 
the trail over a mile. Xow and then we saw that a 
wolf, a fox, and other animals had practised their trail- 
ing instincts on the elk's tracks. Here and there, he 
would show me where a snake, a rat, and a prairie 
dog had crossed the track. Nothing had followed or 
crossed the track that the quick eye of Daloria did not 
detect. He gave an account of the habits of all the 
animals that had left their foot-prints on the track, also 
of the state of the weather since the elk passed, and 
the effect of sunshine, winds, aridity, sand storms, and 
other influences that had a bearing on these tracks." 



252 JETS OF NEW MEANINGS. 

The true philosopher will observe the entire absence 
of " superstition " in all the methods and convictions 
of the wild trailer of the far West. His observations 
are correct and of practical value, because strictly in 
accordance with the laws and teachings of cause and 
effect. He has recourse to no mysterious proceedings, 
incantations, fortune-telling crystals, or other witch- 
craftiness, which are so popular with omen-believers 
and the very superstitious. But, instead, you mark 
the honest regard for facts in the nature and habits of 
the animals and persons which inhabit that part of the 
world. Somewhat of this natural sturdy accuracy, and 
somewhat of this anti-superstitious knowledge of the 
laws and facts of life, may be incorporated into the 
education of every human mind. 



LIST OF THE WORKS 

OF 

ANDREW JACKSON DAVIS. 



ARABULA ; or, The Divine Guest. This fresh and beautiful volume is 
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A STELLAR KEY TO THE SUMMER-LAND. Part I. Illustrated with 
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composed of six discourses, delivered by the author before the Harmonial Broth- 
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ANSWERS TO EVER-RECURRING QUESTIONS FROM THE PEOPLE. 
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CHILDREN'S PROGRESSIVE LYCEUM. A Manual, with Directions for 
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GREAT HARMONIA: Being a Philosophical Revelation of the Natural, 
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HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHY OF EVIL; TVith Suggestions for More 
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TALE OF A PHYSICIAN : or, The Seeds and Finite of Crime. This is 
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jr^T Price of Complete Works of A. J. Davis, $26.00. 
Address all orders to the Publishers, 

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THE CHILDREN'S 

Progressive Lyoeu 

A MANUAL, 

With directions for the Organization and Management of Sunday-Schools, 
adapted to the Bodies and Minds of the Young, and containing Rules 
Methods, Exercises, Marches, Lessons, Questions and Answers, Invoca- 
tions, Silver- Chain Recitations, Hymns and Songs. 

Original and Selected. 

By ANDREW JACKSON DAVIS. 



"A pebble in the streamlet scant 

Has changed the course of many a river; 
A dew-drop on the baby plant 

Has warped the giant oak forever." 



$W The Lyceum externally is a work of art — its emblems all bearing 
a beautiful meaning — every color having its own divine significance — 
every badge telling the story of its group, and every group indicating 
one step higher in progress. The pretty picturesque targets all point 
to the top of the mountain, " Liberty" farthest up the ascent, with the 
white badge fluttering wing-like upward, and beckoning to the little 
ones at the "Fountain" to gather up their ribbons (red, like the heart- 
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wait to let them in. Religion is natural — this is one of its most natural 
expressions, leading to harmony, love, and happiness. 

" Suffer little children to come unto me," said the gentle Nazarene, 
11 for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven." Is it strange then that one 
lovely constellation of pure little ones should attract to us the holiest 
and most divine influences? If any doubt that this Lyceum movement 
is an inspiration, let them stand among the Groups a single day ; let them 
feel the holy influences that fall in showers from the higher spheres, 
the uprisings of the soul, as involuntarily it answers to the call from its 
true home, the inspirations that fall upon the heart like angel breath- 
ings, thrilling each string with melody, and filling the whole being with 
a yearning for God and Heaven. 

Price, per copy, 70 cents, and 8 cents postage if sent by mail ; and 
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Address the Publishers, 

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158 WASHINGTON STREET, BOSTON, MASS., 



AN EXTRAORDINARY NEW BOOK 

BY ANDEEW JACKSON DAVIS, 

ENTITLED, 

A. STELLAR KEY 

TO 

The Summer-Land. 

P ART 1 . 

Illustrated with Diagrams and Engravings of Celestial 
Scenery. 

Men of Science ! Thinking Men ! ! Independent Men ! ! 1 Minds 
skeptical about the Future ! ! ! ! - HERE IS A BOOK FOR YOU. 

This is the twentieth volume from the pen of the inspired Seer and 
Teacher, Andrew Jackson Davis. He has heretofore explained the 
wonders of creation, the mysteries of science and philosophy, the order, 
progress, and harmony of Nature in thousands of pages of living inspi- 
ration ; he has solved the mystery of Death, and revealed the connection 
between the world of matter and the world of spirits. 

Mr. Davis opens wide the door of future human life, and shows us where 
we are to dwell when we put aside the garments of mortality for the vest- 
ments of angels. He says : " The volume is designed to furnish scien- 
tific and philosophical evidences of the existence of an inhabitable 
sphere or zone among the suns and planets of space. These evidences 
are indispensable, being adapted to all who seek a solid, rational, philo- 
sophical foundation on which to rest their hopes of a substantial existence 
after Death." 

The lessons of this book are entirely original, and direct the mind and 
thoughts into channels hitherto wholly unexplored. 

The account of the spiritual universe : the immortal mind looking into 
the heavens ; the existence of a spiritual zone ; its possibility and proba- 
bility; its formation and scientific certainty; the harmonies of the 
universe ; the physical scenery and constitution of the Summer-Land, 
its location, and domestic life in the spheres — are new and wonderfully 
interesting. 

This book is selling rapidly, and will be read by hundreds and 
thousands of persons. Price $1 ; postage 16c. Liberal discount to the 
trade. 

Address all orders to the Publishers, 

WILLIAM WHITE & CO., 
158 WASHINGTON STREET, 

BOSTON. MASS. 

































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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



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